On August 22, 2025, Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian woman, was fatally stabbed aboard Charlotte’s LYNX Blue Line near the Camden Road stop. Police arrested DeCarlos Dejuan Brown Jr., 34, and charged him with first-degree murder along with a federal count for “causing death on a mass transportation system.” We extend condolences to Iryna’s family and community, and we also recognize DeCarlos as an African son of the working class whose life was shaped by untreated schizophrenia, homelessness and abandonment.
This tragedy is real. And so is the pattern: the colonial State exploits every crisis to expand policing, prisons and militarization because its parasitic nature produces the very conditions of poverty, illness and alienation in the first place.
The colonial myth: white humanity, African savagery
When a white terrorist like Dylann Roof massacred Africans in a Charleston church, police calmly arrested him and even bought him food from Burger King. When an African like DeCarlos is in visible crisis and violence erupts, the same system brands him a savage, a thug, a criminal and demands cages or death.
That double standard isn’t a mistake. It is how colonial capitalism narrates social harm: whiteness is humanized, Africanness criminalized. Out of that same narrative, we can mourn Iryna while rejecting the lie that African poverty and untreated illness equal inherent savagery.
They value dollars, not lives
While the people mourn, the rulers count. Mecklenburg County heads into a November referendum to raise the sales tax by one percent for transportation. By the statute called the Projects for Advancing Vehicle-Infrastructure Enhancements (P.A.V.E.) Act, new revenue is split with 40 percent to roads, 40 percent to rail and 20 percent to bus, projected at $19.4B over 30 years. Immediately after Iryna’s killing, officials shifted the debate to “public safety,” which is code for more police on trains because the tax and the city’s image are at stake.
That pressure came fast from Washington. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy threatened Charlotte with “Zero. None. Nada” in federal transit dollars, making it clear that police supremacy is the price of funding. That is extortion, not care.
Here’s the contradiction: a regressive sales tax squeezes workers at the register, while the “safety” dollars it raises are funneled into surveillance, transit policing and fare sweeps against the same poor and African riders already criminalized for a $2 fare. What looks like infrastructure on the surface is colonial order underneath.
This rhetoric also sets the stage for militarization. Trump snarled that “Democrat-run cities set loose savage, blood-thirsty criminals,” pointing to Charlotte as proof. U.S. attorney Russ Ferguson warned the federal government would “save our city.”
This language isn’t about safety, it justifies occupation. We’ve seen it before: federal agents in Washington D.C., militarized units in California, Trump threatening Memphis while naming Baltimore, Chicago and Charlotte as next. As imperialism falters abroad, it turns its war machine inward to the domestically colonized populations of Africans and Indigenous peoples.
Cop-aganda and the carceral reflex
After Iryna Zarutska’s death, officials moved to expand police presence at stations and on trains, with council voices pushing Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (CMPD) control of the Blue Line. Meanwhile, federal prosecutors stacked charges on DeCarlos, including a federal transit homicide count that carries life in prison or the death penalty. The ruling class across both parties converges on one solution: more force.
But violence on transit does not come from the absence of police; it flows from poverty, alienation and untreated psychosis. When the State sells “more cops = more safety,” that’s cop-aganda: grief converted into consent for repression, while budgets for clinics, housing and community care wither.
Grief deserves justice, not more cages.
DeCarlos’s humanity, our reality
DeCarlos is not a monster; he is ours. His family describes years of psychosis, a diagnosis of schizophrenia, repeated short-term commitments, and releases back to the street with no real care. In January, he called 911 saying something was “controlling” him, classic psychotic symptoms, and cycled through arrest and release yet again. None of that absolves the harm to Iryna’s loved ones; it indicts a system that answers crisis with handcuffs instead of treatment.
Both Iryna and DeCarlos were casualties of the same system, one through its neglect of illness, the other through its cultivation of violence. Colonial capitalism starves us of resources, then punishes us when crisis explodes. It will spotlight DeCarlos as the face of “lawlessness” while hiding the roots: low wages, housing precarity, shuttered psych beds and no continuum of care.
The referendum and the real base/superstructure
The referendum isn’t neutral. In form, it funds trains, roads and buses; in content, it retools urban space for capital. The P.A.V.E. formula locks spending while elites push a regional authority and, with it, a more militarized transit regime. If the measure passes under “safety,” we should expect intensified fare sweeps, profiling and displacement around rail corridors.
This is why the Blue Line has cops with rifles and sidearms instead of crisis workers with housing vouchers. A city that can instantly mobilize riot-ready police somehow cannot mobilize 24/7 crisis teams, housing, psychiatry and income floors. That allocation is political, not natural.
Imperialism in crisis
Abroad, the U.S. bleeds resources for war; at home, it cannot and will not resolve the contradictions of inequality, mental illness and social breakdown. In decline, imperialism grows more repressive with federal grandstanding, funding threats, and “law-and-order” theater. Charlotte is a local stage for a national script. The bosses will use Iryna’s death to pass taxes that fall heaviest on workers and to justify policing that falls hardest on Africans.
We honor Iryna by refusing that script and by demanding the resources that would have saved both her and DeCarlos.
The line of march: African power
Neither Democrats nor Republicans can protect us; both wings are instruments of colonial capitalism. Safety is housing, clinics, income and community control in the hands of the African working class, not cages. We fight for Black Community Control of the Police on transit and everywhere. We fight for a transportation program that answers to the people, not to developers or Washington threats.
The advanced detachment must lead. Don’t let grief be weaponized into more chains. We don’t agonize, we must organize. Join the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP), the Vanguard of our class. Join the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM), the mass movement whose motto is Self-Determination is the highest form of democracy. Organize court support rooted in mental-health justice for DeCarlos, not retributive justice. Stand with Iryna’s family in grief. Build neighborhood safety teams that escort riders, de-escalate crisis and connect people to real services. Demand the reallocation of “security” budgets into care.
A new humanity in birth
To join this struggle is not only to fight against the colonial State, but to envision and build something entirely new. Revolution is not simply tearing down what exists; it is the process by which we make ourselves new in the act of remaking the world. We are the architects of a future where safety means dignity, health and collective prosperity.
We don’t accept colonial “order.” We are building Black Power. Power that remakes society and ourselves. Join APSP. Join InPDUM. Join the revolution in the final offensive against imperialism, and commit to the birth of a new humanity.
