On Aug. 22, young Iryna Zarutska walked on to a light rail train in Charlotte, N.C., and sat down for what would be her last ride. Like so many of us, she disappeared into a cocoon of her earbuds and her phone. Before she could reach her destination and walk off the train, she was savagely killed without provocation. DeCarlos Brown, Jr., sitting one row behind her, pulled out a folding knife, opened it, stood up behind her, and struck with lethal force. Her life ended at 23 years of age.
Iryna was a refugee from the war in her native Ukraine, surviving in her new country by working for a pizzeria and doing other odd jobs. She did not know Mr. Brown, nor did he know her. We do not know exactly what possessed him to kill her, but to see the videos or the photo of him rising up behind her like some murderous wraith in a hoodie brings forth a visceral response.
My personal reaction has been especially intense because I was once a victim of a similar attack. One afternoon in high school, I walked innocently down a hallway only to be struck so hard behind my ear I never felt the blow. Like a puppet whose strings had been cut, I simply dropped to the floor unconscious. Perhaps it had something to do with my own eventual conversion to Christianity that the young woman who emerged out of the crowd of onlookers to help me to my feet when I woke and to walk me to a place where she could find help was one of the few public Christians I knew at my school. In any case, I think I’ve maintained a heightened situational awareness ever since that day.
But we look at poor Iryna. She had no chance to defend herself. She did not know the attack was coming. After she’d been fatally struck with the blade, the picture of her that remains is of a woman who has been dealt a terminal cut and doesn’t realize it. She is protectively curled up, staring in fear at the man who has stabbed her. It is a deeply pathetic and pitiful image. And what of this man? One might almost imagine his rationality and reason caught in some reptilian deathroll and pulled below the surface. Is it madness, possession, or sociopathic malevolence? We don’t know. Perhaps we never will.
Click Here to Read More (Originally Published at World Magazine )