The bloodcurdling murder in late August of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska by a complete stranger sitting behind her on public transit in Charlotte, N.C., has brought to light, once again, our nation’s almost literally insane public health policy regarding the severely mentally ill.
The murder drew new attention Friday when the Charlotte Area Transit System released video footage of the crime; a scene from hell could not be more soul-sickening. The petite young woman, head down, calmly reads her cellphone, unaware of the agitated man behind her, who suddenly pulls out a knife, looms over her, and lunges at her neck.
Court records show that the man wielding the knife in the video, Decarlos Brown Jr., has had more than a dozen convictions since 2011, including for armed robbery, felony larceny, and assault. Shortly after being released from a five-year prison term, in February 2021, he was arrested for assaulting and injuring his sister. There is little doubt that Brown is a career criminal and that we need more robust law enforcement at every level that will result in more criminals getting arrested and the convicted serving more time behind bars.
But another aspect of Brown’s history deserves attention: his years of untreated mental illness.
WSOC-TV reporter Joe Bruno wrote on X about an interview with Brown’s mother:
She wanted to speak about the arrest to highlight how the system failed. . . . When Brown was released from prison, ‘he started saying weird things.’ She says she got Brown evaluated but his behavior became aggressive so she got an involuntary commitment order from the courts. He was placed under psychiatric monitoring for two weeks and diagnosed with schizophrenia. But after he was released she says Brown became so aggressive she had to kick him out. He became homeless.
As this mother has tragically learned — and as many other mothers with similarly troubled children have also learned — it is virtually impossible to get help for a person with severe mental illness, even when that person has a lengthy record of violence and threatening behavior and has been in and out of mental institutions and prisons over many years. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department was well aware of Brown before the murder of Zarutska. They had encountered him three times in 2024 alone and referred him to “resources” for help. It’s not clear whether he declined the help, as is his legal right. In January this year, Brown called 911 to complain that someone had given him “manmade material” to control when he “ate, walked, and talked.” For that call, Brown was arrested for misusing 911; despite his extensive history of crimes and mental illness, Magistrate Judge Teresa Stokes, who is also the co-owner of Pinnacle Recovery Services, a treatment center for substance-abuse and mental-health disorders, released him without bond on a written promise to reappear.
If Brown’s is not a case for mandated psychiatric treatment and institutionalization, then what is? Laws vary somewhat by state, but the reigning approach to the severely mentally ill focuses on providing them with as much liberty as possible, in an effort to fight “stigma” and to maintain their dignity and humanity. As a result, the person will receive the bare minimum of care — perhaps a few days or weeks of medication and supervision — and be stabilized just enough to be released to the streets once again. The usual pattern — thanks to anosognosia, a neurological symptom in the severely mentally ill that leaves them unable to perceive that they are ill — is that the person then stops taking medication and repeats the downward spiral into psychosis. Only when the person is an “immediate” danger to himself or others will the authorities intervene to mandate evaluation and treatment. All too often, that intervention comes too late, only after an eruption of violence.
We need many more psychiatric treatment beds, and we need legal reforms that allow mandated treatment and short- or long-term institutionalization. The vast majority of mentally ill people are not dangerous; only about 1.1 percent of Americans are estimated to have schizophrenia, and most of these people will never be violent. But the tiny percentage who are the most troubled deserve more than the fake “liberty” of being free to wander the streets, trapped in the mental prison of their own delusions.