The random and unprovoked killing of a young woman in North Carolina several weeks ago has become a viral video, a political football, and a powerful rightwing talking point – even as the horror and anger her death has provoked obscures what experts say is a vital story about the failures of the American mental health system.The alleged perpetrator, Decarlos Brown Jr, 34, has a long history of problems with the law and mental health issues. He had been arrested 14 times and served a five-year stint for armed robbery. Brown had also come to believe that there was something alien and malevolent inside him – a “man-made material”, he told people, possibly a computer chip implanted by the government that was fighting him for control of his body.Brown was riding a light rail in Charlotte, North Carolina, last month when he allegedly stood up with a pocket knife, abruptly stabbed a nearby woman, then walked away. The victim, Iryna Zarutska, was a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee who worked at a pizza parlor and hoped to become a veterinary assistant. Haunting security-camera footage shows her curled up weakly as she bleeds to death in her restaurant uniform. In a phone call from jail after his arrest, Brown, who reportedly has schizophrenia, told his sister that Zarutska had been trying to read his mind.Initially a tragedy covered by mostly local news outlets, Zarutska’s death has grown in recent days into a cause célèbre on the American right. In more centrist conservative accounts, Zarutska’s killing is a symbol and symptom of a lax criminal justice system that should never have allowed Brown to freely walk the streets. In more inflammatory, far-right discourse, the story of a formerly incarcerated Black man’s killing of a defenseless blond woman has become racist fodder for sinister theories about white persecution and Black criminality.On X, Elon Musk has tweeted or retweeted dozens of posts about the story, many arguing that the media would have covered the story more aggressively if a white person had attacked a Black victim, and contrasting it with the media attention given to cases like that of Daniel Penny, a white man who was arrested in New York in 2023 for killing an unhoused Black man with mental illness on the subway in what he described as self-defense. (He was acquitted in trial.)Viral content online has claimed that Brown targeted Zarutska specifically because she was white, though as of now there is no evidence that he did. Some rightwing accounts have noted with pointed irony that a photo that has circulated of Zarutska appears to show a Black Lives Matter poster in the background. Musk and others have pledged money to a campaign to put up George Floyd-style murals of her across American cities.Outrage has reached the highest levels of the US government. Donald Trump has declared on social media that the “ANIMAL who so violently killed the beautiful young lady from Ukraine, who came to America searching for peace and safety, should be given a ‘Quick’ (there is no doubt!) Trial, and only awarded THE DEATH PENALTY.”View image in fullscreenJD Vance, the vice-president, called Brown a “thug” and noted his lengthy arrest record. “It wasn’t law enforcement that failed,” Vance wrote. “It was weak politicians … who kept letting him out of prison.” Earlier this year Brown was arrested for allegedly making unfounded 911 calls, and released after signing a written promise to reappear in court.Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, has announced federal charges against Brown – despite the strong possibility that Brown is mentally ill and could thereby be deemed not culpable by reason of insanity, and despite the fact that the federal government would not typically become involved in the prosecution of a tragic but random act of local violence.Emmitt Riley, a professor of politics and African American studies at Sewanee, the University of the South, said that Zarutska’s death is an undeniable tragedy but has become politicized in a way with obvious racial overtones.“Donald Trump has a history of calling for the death penalty, in particular for Black and brown people,” he said – most famously in the case of the Central Park Five, a group of teenagers who were imprisoned for the 1989 rape of a woman jogging in New York. Although they were later exonerated, Trump has never apologized.Experts on mental health and criminal justice believe the true story of this case is less sensational than tragic, and indicative of a fraying American mental health system that failed to protect Zarutska in part because it first failed to protect Brown from himself.“When I hear people define this as [solely] a criminal justice problem or lack of being ‘tough on crime,’ I think: ‘Let’s be real. Let’s define the problem as what it is,’” Sheryl Kubiak, the dean of the school of social work at Wayne State University, said. “We have a mental health crisis in this country, and we need to address it with appropriate mental health resources.”Jails, she said, were not created for treating mental illness, nor equipped to do so.Although Brown had a long history of reckless behavior, his mental problems seemed to get worse after he was released from prison in 2020, members of his family have told the news media. He walked around talking to himself and was given to unexpected angry outbursts.Like many people with seeming severe mental illness, Brown was offered treatment but resisted accepting it. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia, his mother told ABC, but refused to take medication. She and other members of the family repeatedly tried to get him help. At one point she asked a hospital to admit him but was told, she said, that the hospital could not “make” a person accept treatment. At another point a mental health facility kept him for in-patient treatment but released him after two weeks.Kubiak and other experts note that cases like Brown’s illustrate two longstanding and overlapping debates about the treatment of mental illness. One concerns “institutionalization”, the treatment of serious mental illness in dedicated institutions segregated from larger society, and the other concerns “involuntary” treatment of those who need treatment but refuse it.In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the United States built large, then state-of-the-art mental hospitals across the country to house and treat patients. But institutionalization fell out of favor in the 1950s and 1960s, due to changing cultural and legal attitudes, advances in medication, and a fear that institutions were overused and risked abuse. Mental health practices instead emphasized treating people within their communities. Civil libertarians also lobbied for the bar for involuntary treatment to be stricter. Many of the hospitals were shuttered.View image in fullscreenYet the government has not properly funded and organized a system to replace the older one, Jeffrey Swanson, a sociologist and professor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University, said. Where someone with severe mental health problems might have previously had access to dedicated, long-term treatment facilities, they are now likely to end up in a revolving door of jails, ERs, and psychiatric wards with too many patients and too few beds.“Now we have probably more people with serious mental illnesses on any given day in one of our massive big city jails, like Cook county jail in Chicago or the Los Angeles county jail or Rikers Island [in New York], than we ever had in these asylums,” he said. “And it’s really a scandal.”Some progressives are opposed to involuntary treatment, casting it as a violation of consent. Mental health experts tend to take a more nuanced view, Swanson said, particularly in the case of patients whose illnesses are severe and defined by “anosognosia,” a term that means that someone doesn’t recognize that they are ill.A well-known argument for involuntary treatment, he added, says: “We wouldn’t let our grandmother with Alzheimer’s disease wander around and sleep in the subway just because she doesn’t know that she needs treatment; that’d be inhumane. So why do we tolerate that for young adults with schizophrenia?”His own opinion, he said, is complicated by the inadequacies of the current mental health system. “If you’re going to coerce someone into treatment for their own good, you have to have the system capacity to provide those services. I mean, otherwise, it’s really ironic to say: ‘We’re going to force you into treatment that doesn’t exist. We’re going to force you, but we don’t have a bed for you.’”Zarutska was buried in Charlotte on 27 August. Family members who were also in the US as refugees attended the funeral, but her father, who cannot leave Ukraine due to wartime restrictions, had to watch by video call.The Ukrainian embassy offered to help repatriate her body for burial, according to an uncle who spoke to People, but her family chose to inter her in the US; she had fallen “so much in love with the American dream”, he said.Her death is something “I would wish on no one,” Riley, the professor of political science, said. Yet until the US has better systems for treating mental health, “this will be a repeated cycle.” More
