Iryna Zaretska was stabbed to death in Charlotte, North Carolina, by a man named DeCarlos Brown Jr., who had a history of violent crime and untreated paranoid schizophrenia. Brown believed that Iryna could read his thoughts and that voices were telling him to kill her. Despite his violent past, Brown was free due to cashless bail policies and failures in the mental health and justice systems. This tragedy happened as Iryna, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee who had fled the war in Ukraine, was attacked on a train, stabbed multiple times in broad daylight. The incident has sparked outrage about criminal justice reform, bail policies, and mental health care failures that allowed Brown to be free and result in this preventable death.
