Ignored by media, enabled by Dems: how soft-on-crime policies unleashed murder of Ukrainian refugee

According to most legacy mainstream news outfits, the horrific murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska was not worthy of a headline. The attention from "MAGA influencers seeking to elevate the issue of violent urban crime and accuse mainstream media of under-covering" is instead the focal point of reporting by outlets like Axios. 

On August 22, Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee who escaped war to start anew in the U.S., was viciously stabbed to death with a pocket knife in what appeared to be a random attack on a Charlotte, North Carolina light rail train. The suspect, 34-year-old Decarlos Brown Jr., a homeless black man with a long history of evading serious charges due to mental health claims, was apprehended and charged with first-degree murder, fueling public outrage over lax crime policies and judicial failures.

The media blackout was shocking to many in the independent news sphere. The murder took place two and a half weeks ago, on August 22. CNN, Reuters, The New York Times, Associated Press, NBC News, ABC News and The Washington Post took 17 days to report on it. It took North Carolina's Democrat Mayor Josh Stein the same amount of time to comment on the murder. 

Leftists try to flush Zarutska's murder down the memory-hole

Wikipedia is under fire for trying to remove a page about the murder. Editors at the site are feuding internally after attempts to suppress the story by proposing the newly created page about Zarutska's killing be deleted, arguing it lacked sufficient notability for inclusion.

Critics, including Elon Musk, who called the murder a "hate crime," and Piers Morgan, who condemned the "senseless, unprovoked" murder, have slammed Wikipedia's deletion attempt as censorship, pointing to minimal mainstream media attention. 

The radio-silence from traditional media up until Monday reflects a broader attempt to ignore crime when the victim is white and the alleged perpetrator is black. 

In another instance over the weekend, beloved Auburn University veterinary sciences professor Dr. Julie Gard Schnuelle was hacked to death with a machete while walking her dog in Kiesel Park, Alabama—a location she frequented daily. The 59-year-old retired professor's red Ford F-150 truck was stolen by the attacker. The following day, a black male, 28-year-old Harold Rashad Dabney III from Montgomery, was arrested and charged with capital murder after police located the stolen vehicle nearby and linked him to the homicide.

Nothing to see here, move along

Schnuelle, who was white, was found murdered on Saturday, September 6. Although the killing was covered by local media the next day, a Google search shows that no national mainstream news outlets reported the story for two days until Monday, when ABC News published an online slideshow of images culled from local television coverage with no original reporting. The first legacy media outfit to publish any original reporting appears to be Newsweek, which published their own story on Monday afternoon.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt held a press conference Tuesday afternoon, dressing down the mainstream media for not reporting on Zarutska's murder in a timely manner. 

Commentators like Professor Glenn Reynolds of the University of Tennessee School of Law similarly criticized the legacy media. He compared in his Substack column the enveloping coverage of the deaths of young blacks like George Floyd with the vacuum of coverage about Zarutska's killing. 

Reynolds wrote, "while rabble-rousing is the most obvious exercise of press power, rabble-snoozing — the power to keep a news story dormant and out of the general public’s notice — is undoubtedly a bigger one."

Social media took notice. X influencer "Cynical Publius" took media reporter Brian Stelter to task for calling the people who were outraged by the media blackout "racist filth." Publius wrote: "The only 'racist filth' I am aware of in this story are the countless 'journalists' who deliberately suppressed this story because the races of the murderer and the murdered do not align with the preferred narrative of the Democrat/Media Complex."

The media blackout helps hide the soft-on-crime policies of Democrats

President Donald Trump posted a video to his Truth Social account criticizing the policies he believes contributed to the issue: "For far too long, Americans have been forced to put up with Democrat-run cities that set loose savage, bloodthirsty criminals to prey on innocent people. In every place they control radical left judges, politicians and activists have adopted a policy of catch-and-release for thugs and killers."

Charlotte is one of the most dangerous cities in America, yet does not receive as many mentions in crime conversations as cities like Chicago and San Francisco. Charlotte's total crime index is 45.99 incidents per 1,000 residents. Violent crimes, including assault and robbery, occur at a rate of 7.46 incidents per 1,000 residents, which equates to a 1 in 134 chance of victimization.

Charlotte, where Iryna Zarutska was murdered, is led by Democrat Mayor Vi Lyles. The last Republican mayor of Charlotte was Pat McCrory, who served from 1995 to 2009.

Lyles initially downplayed the murder, and showed deep compassion for the killer, who had been arrested and released 14 times before the killing. “We will never arrest our way out of issues such as homelessness and mental health,” Lyles said. “Mental health disease is just that — a disease like any other that needs to be treated with the same compassion, diligence and commitment as cancer or heart disease.” 

Her initial comments never mentioned Iryna Zarutska.

While Charlotte is not a no-cash-bail city, the judicial system certainly played a role in enabling Brown to recommit. Brown was arrested and released back into the public at least 14 documented times for crimes ranging from robbery with a dangerous weapon and criminal theft to felony larceny, breaking and entering and assault. 

He served a five-year sentence for robbery with a deadly weapon in 2014, and upon release, was arrested for assaulting his own sister.