Decarlos Brown’s story is shocking, yet all too familiar.

I n her response to the murder of Iryna Zaruska on a light-rail train in Charlotte, North Carolina, the city’s mayor demonstrated the mindset that allowed the heinous act to happen in the first place.

Mayor Vi Lyles called the murder of the young Ukrainian refugee woman “a tragic situation that sheds light on problems with society’s safety nets related to mental healthcare.”

This is euphemistic prattle. What Lyles calls “a tragic situation” was a gruesome crime, and the lack of “society safety nets” must be her way of admitting that Charlotte serially failed to confine a deranged repeat offender so he couldn’t continue to menace the public.

The alleged killer, Decarlos Brown, was schizophrenic. His mother reports that, after he gained release in 2020 from a five-year sentence for robbery with a deadly weapon, he began to say strange things and behave aggressively (he assaulted his sister). She got him evaluated and then got an involuntary-commitment order.

After two weeks of monitoring, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and released. His mother couldn’t handle Brown and kicked him out of the house, rendering him homeless.

After that, Brown repeatedly demonstrated his out-of-control madness, and still, no one had the sense to take him off the streets.

Police interacted with Brown three different times in 2024 and referred him to “resources,” although no one knows what that means.

Then, in January 2025, he told police, while they were conducting “a welfare check” on him, that “man-made materials” in his body were controlling him, a classic paranoid belief. When the cops told him they couldn’t help him with that, he called 911. That resulted in a charge for abusing the emergency-response system.

One judge released him in exchange for a “written promise” that Brown would come back for a hearing, and then — after his attorney filed a motion questioning his “capacity to proceed” — another judge ordered a forensic evaluation that was never completed.

Not that his condition was a mystery. If anyone had asked Brown’s family or the cops, they surely would have said he was out of his mind.

This is the history Mayor Vi Lyles refers to when she says that Brown “has long struggled with mental health and appears to have suffered a crisis.” Well, yes, he was suffering a yearslong crisis.

Brown’s story is shocking, yet all too familiar. It recurs over and over again in cities that tolerate the untreated mentally ill sleeping on grates. Since the great wave of deinstitutionalization in the 1960s, we’ve lost the collective will to insist that those suffering from serious mental illness get help, in an institution if necessary.

This requires spending more resources on psychiatric beds and changing laws to make it easier to mandate treatment and institutionalization. To acknowledge this does not entail, as the mayor put it in her statement, “villainizing” the mentally ill. It is true that most people suffering from these disorders don’t commit acts of violence. Still, it does no one any favors — not the mentally ill, or the general public — to let them go untreated, living lives of squalor in public places.

“We will never arrest our way out of issues such as homelessness and mental health,” Mayor Vi Lyles insisted. It is true that too many mentally ill people end up in jails. The only acceptable options, though, are to imprison the deranged who commit or threaten criminal acts, or to force them to get treatment, perhaps in institutions.

The third option is what we’ve done for decades. It is to look the other way, to leave families no good options in dealing with their sick loved ones, to pretend it is an exercise of liberty to let disturbed people molder on the streets, to treat the “unhoused” as a privileged victim group, and to mumble the same old nonsense after an unspeakable crime.

We’ve heard it from the likes of Mayor Vi Lyles before — and, sadly and infuriatingly, inevitably will again.

© 2025 by King Features Syndicate