The slaughter of Iryna Zarutska was horrific, unacceptable—and preventable.
The video of Decarlos Brown, Jr., slaughtering 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte light-rail train on the night of August 22nd is sickening in many ways, but one aspect of the horror was how mundanely it unfolded. All of us who have had to contend with greater chaos and danger on mass-transit systems since 2020 have created useful fictions for ourselves: that wouldn’t happen to me, because I know not to sit near the crazy guy. I know to sit around other people. I know how to defend myself—punch someone, bite someone, scream. The video demolishes that fiction. We’ve also had to contend with a related fiction: that our transit systems remain safe. It’s time we stopped accepting random murders on our transit systems as normal.
The TTC is an urban transit nightmare.
