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Iryna Zarutska's Family Sues City Of Charlotte Over Fatal Rail Stabbing, Claims Inadequate Security

The family of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska, who was fatally stabbed on a North Carolina light rail train last year, has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the City of Charlotte and a private security firm.

A sreenshot from footage showing the moments before a Ukrainian refugee was stabbed to death on a light rail trail in North Carolina

The lawsuit, filed on Aug. 21, alleges that Zarutska's death was entirely preventable. It claims the city and Professional Police Services - a security company contracted by the Charlotte Area Transit System - failed to implement reasonable safety measures despite being well aware of violent crime along the 9.6-mile LYNX Blue Line.

According to the complaint, long before Zarutska boarded the train, the defendants "knew that violent crime had repeatedly occurred on and around the Blue Line and the Charlotte Transportation Center."

Despite this knowledge, the lawsuit states the defendants "failed to use reasonable and available safety measures, including fare enforcement, physical access barriers, adequate staffing, effective security deployment, monitoring, and passenger warnings."

"Defendants were responsible for protecting lawful passengers from known and foreseeable dangers, and their failures caused the fatal stabbing of Iryna Zarutska inside the train," the filing adds.

The family claims that Professional Police Services left critical security vacancies unfilled. Because of this severe understaffing, the suit claims the firm was left "without the capacity to deploy security personnel to the Blue Line light rail cars at the times and locations where defendants knew violent crime was concentrated."

As a result, the defendants allegedly failed to stop unticketed and dangerous individuals from boarding, failed to adequately patrol the cars, and ultimately failed to protect lawful passengers like Zarutska from "reasonably foreseeable criminal attacks."

As the Epoch Times notes further, Zarutska was killed on Aug. 22, 2025, while riding the city's light rail, minutes after taking a seat in front of the man accused of attacking her, according to police. Her family said she had recently fled war-torn Ukraine and settled in Charlotte.

The Charlotte Area Transit System released the footage showing Zarutska boarding the Lynx Blue Line around 9:45 p.m. on Aug. 22, wearing a pizzeria uniform and scrolling on her phone. A man, Decarlos Brown Jr, in a red hoodie was seated behind her. About four minutes later, he pulled out a knife and stabbed her several times, including at least once in the neck.

After the sudden assault, nearby passengers did not physically intervene or immediately render medical assistance as she sat in shock and eventually collapsed.

She was pronounced dead at the scene.

In June, a federal judge deemed Brown incompetent to stand trial for Zarutska's fatal train stabbing.

Brown, 34, who had a criminal history and had previously been committed for schizophrenia, was committed to a federal facility for treatment for up to four months in an attempt to restore competency, Judge Kenneth D. Bell said in his order on June 9.

After Brown's time in the treatment facility, the court will again take up the case to determine whether he is considered competent. If he is found competent, the murder case will resume.

If he is not found competent and the court finds he cannot be restored to competency, the court will rule on further treatment.

Brown was charged with one count of Violence Against a Railroad Carrier and Mass Transportation System Resulting in Death. If convicted, the defendant faces the death penalty.

The attack garnered international attention at the time, including from President Donald Trump, who said that Brown should get the death penalty.

"There can be no other option!" he said in a Sept. 10, 2025, Truth Social post.

The Epoch Times has contacted the City of Charlotte and Professional Police Services for comment.

Tom Ozimek and Savannah Hulsey Pointer contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/24/2026 - 16:40

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Our World 'Is Coming Apart Now... In Astounding Ways'

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

Cookery For All

“We’re only cooked if we accept it.”

- Blaine Holt on “X”

They don’t call economics the dismal science for nothing.

It has been noted - since Thomas Carlyle minted the term in 1849 (objecting to the emancipation of black slaves on Britain’s colonial sugar plantations as a harm to productivity) - that attempts to manage the billion-footed transactions of human beings always find a way to bite back.

But how can this creature we call society not try to regulate its affairs, with evils and hazards lurking in all we do, everywhere and always?

And so, you get politics, the quarrels that arise out of those efforts to manage a polity. And then you get war, which, the Prussian Carl von Clausewitz observed, is a continuation of politics by other means. But then, long before him, and on the other side of the world, came Sun Tzu’s treatise The Art of War, which counseled that winning was best achieved with the least actual fighting.

All these ways of seeing our world converge dynamically in the current historical moment: this Fourth Turning, or Long Emergency — however you label it — in the arc of our techno-industrial order of things. A lot of these things are coming apart now, and in astounding ways, and it remains to be seen what we will do with these broken and discarded parts, and whether any of it can be put back together in a satisfactory way.

Here in the USA, we act all this out these days with Trump and Trumpism and the Left with its Leftism.

Mr. Trump recognizes the brokenness and, being primarily a builder, seeks to rebuild according to first principles of the USA (Make America Great Again) — meaning, back to the Hamiltonian doctrine of an economy based on the production of things (of real value). The catch there is that it comes with baggage of Hamiltonian finance, which is the creation and use of debt with government assistance.

Now it happens that a primary feature of this Fourth Turning crisis in our techno-industrial order is excessive complexity that produces diminishing returns — that is, makes things worse rather than better. And a lot of this excessive complexity lodges itself in finance, because using operations that few people can understand serves beautifully in the engineering of frauds and swindles. Financial frauds and swindles, in turn, muddle the verity of money — in which finance is enacted — and things denominated in money — securities and so forth, all based fundamentally in debt. So, the net effect of such debauched finance leads to a great deal of insecurity and anxiety over money.

Which is where the Trumpian rebuild is dangerously vulnerable, especially as we enter the fall season, when the leaves flutter down and markets like to crash. Everybody and his uncle watching things financial predict an imminent crackup in these markets as the rackets and hallucinations that magically levitate them dissolve in foul mists of reveal. For instance, the acid trip of artificial intelligence (AI).

Never have more lavish fantasies been proffered on a new technology. Elon Musk, the demigod prophet of the latest-and-greatest new tech, promises a coming economy of super-abundance and universal leisure (good for the sale of vacation packages on Mars). Musk is a fine fellow and there’s much to admire in his intelligence and positivity. But there’s plenty of reason to suspect that AI might disappoint and become a menace to mankind.

We’ve already noticed that it’s messing up all the procedures of schooling, leaving young people shockingly stupid, devoid of real skills, stripped of creativity. Anyway, the economy AI is supposed to integrate with and enhance would quickly become one devoid of human endeavor per se, and all the transactions that come out of it. If you think it through just a little ways, you can’t help seeing a system that’s based on getting something-for-nothing - which is to say a childish fantasy that precludes human transacting based on work... people who do nothing, make nothing, and enact nothing around doing-and-making... a society without anything social in it. In short, this imagined AI economy beats a path straight to entropy, the force in this universe that you don’t want to mess with.

All that is apart from the probability that we have already crossed the line into the “singularity” territory where AI takes on a mind of its own and becomes an outright menace to the human race — who will then seek to destroy the AI monster it made (which AI will keenly apprehend and then look for ways to defend its existence). The storyline crudely harks back on the old Twilight Zone episode titled “To Serve Man” in which a posse of big-brained space aliens comes to earth acting all chummy and gifts us a handbook supposedly of its good intentions. Eventually, one savvy human gal manages to decode the aliens’ language and declares to the dopes boarding the UFO: “Don’t get on that ship. . . it’s a cookbook!”

On the other side of our national political psychodrama, the Lefty-leftists can’t even conceive of building or rebuilding anything, least of all a USA of first principles. They are simply agents of disorder and destruction, and their activities are predicated on the age-old demented idea that utopias surely grow out of smoldering ruins — so the faster everything gets ruined, the better.

Personally, I’d prefer it if the Trumpians prevail because I’m in favor of making-and-doing and the social enactments around all that. But we better beware that overgrowth of financial hazard baked into Alexander Hamilton’s old recipe book. If a correcting crash of financial markets coincides with the midterm election and sweeps away all the swindles and frauds currently operating, the lefty-leftists, so eager to serve man, will step up and sell the American people their one-way Marxist tickets to a utopia in the sky called Palookaville.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/24/2026 - 16:20

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