Ukrainian Refugee Falls Victim to America’s Black Crime Fetish
The brutal, unprovoked stabbing of a beautiful 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, Iryna Zarutska, on a North Carolina train is shocking—but the essence of the story is numbingly familiar. The suspect, a 35-year-old black man named Decarlos Brown Jr., is a vagrant and criminal who had been given one too many slaps on the wrist by a justice system infected with pro-black ideology. The district attorney of Mecklenburg County, Spencer Merriweather, blames Zarutska’s murder on lack of investment in “mental health.”
Mental illness did contribute to this tragedy, but on a mass scale. Zarutska is a victim of the lunacy of liberal America, which over the past decade or so has allowed the grievances of the criminal underclass to dictate policy in city after city. This ludicrous approach is informed by the perverse notion that black people belong to a special protected class and that law enforcement is injurious to them, despite blacks committing more violent crimes per capita than any other group. The most toxic public policy idea of the last decade, “defund the police,” originated as a response to the death of drug addict and career criminal George Floyd, who became a kind of black messiah in the minds of confused whites all over the country.
Stopping crime is not complicated, but it requires a resolve that our divided country does not have. The average white Democrat has a strange mental block about who criminals tend to be and how they think. When white liberals see a career felon with 13 prior arrests, they imagine a future spoken word poet, a victim of oppression, a product of socioeconomics and systemic racism rather than a human being with free will. Today’s liberals have no concept of the exalted mindset of the typical black criminal who has been cosseted by the law his entire life, or of the sympathy his coethnics feel toward him. GoFundMe was pressured to take down multiple crowdsourcing pages in support of Zarutska’s killer—not the first time the “black community” has responded to a murder by treating the killer like the real victim.
To second Chronicles editor Paul Gottfried’s recent piece in Chronicles, “Blaming the Blamable,” the denizens of crime-ridden blue cities are certainly responsible for the chaos that plagues their homes, however aware or not they may be of their culpability. Gottfried makes a connection between black voting preferences and the demographics of crime—a connection that too often goes unnoticed:
[…] those who vote to pamper the criminal class may not be all that upset by the situation. They may well view the criminals as people like themselves and regard the police, even the black ones, as working for enemy whites.
Zarutska, of course, was a foreign refugee who played no role in creating the conditions that led to her demise. That makes her story all the more tragic, and shameful.
Her killer had at least 14 prior arrests, and had been released just months before he randomly decided to end Zarutska’s life as she scrolled on her phone in the seat in front of him. A woke judge let him go in January with a “written promise” to appear at his next court hearing. According to reports, Magistrate Judge Teresa Stokes is the operations director of an organization called Second Chance Services. She let the killer free despite knowing he was a homeless schizophrenic nutjob.
Zarutska met the end feared by many Americans who ride public transit or walk the streets. Alas, her white skin takes precedence over her Ukrainian background in the eyes of the media, which have been overwhelmingly sympathetic to her country in its war with Russia. To them, the conservative backlash to Zarutska’s murder is more worthy of attention than the crime itself. According to left-wing news site Axios, “MAGA influencers” are “drawing repeated attention to violent attacks to elevate the issue of urban crime—and accuse mainstream media of under-covering shocking cases.” A headline from The New York Times declared, “A Gruesome Murder in North Carolina Ignites a Firestorm on the Right.”
To our compromised media, the political imperative to protect black people’s self-esteem overrides every other concern, including any fidelity to truth and decency. If not for the viral spread of the news about Zarutska’s murder on X, and then President Trump calling attention to it, the atrocity would never have received national attention, despite its objectively newsworthy content. Not only is it graphic and shocking, but the victim was a refugee from a major conflict zone seeking safety in our country. The fact that she might have been safer in a literal war zone makes for a striking and sad commentary on the utter chaos that afflicts urban America.
For as long as stopping crime is treated like an unacceptable assault on the dignity of blacks by roughly half the citizens of this country, crime will go unaddressed. Those of us who want to go on living will just avoid the train.
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/ukrainian-refugee-falls-victim-to-americas-black-crime-fetish