A Murder That Says So Much About U.S.

Slaughter of a Ukrainian girl on a Charlotte, NC light rail train shows what a shabby horror show U.S. cities have become.

Just before Christmas, 1959, the American novelist, Truman Capote, began researching the true story of the murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas on the night of November 15 of that year. As Capote saw it, the murder seemed—in an extremely dramatic way—to express the state of American society at that time.

Capote’s research ultimately led to the publication of In Cold Blood, which many consider the founding book of the true crime genre.

I thought of In Cold Blood when I saw the following images. The first is a still from the surveillance video on a Charlotte, NC light rail train showing a man nonchalantly opening his folding knife to kill the young woman sitting in front of him.

The second image captures the man initiating the fatal attack in which he stabbed the girl three times, including a fatal wound to her neck.

The third image is of the victim—23-year-old Iryna Zarutska—combined with a collage the offender’s fourteen mugshots from his previous arrests.

Iryna, who sought refuge in the United States from the war in Ukraine, was riding the train home from her job as a clerk in a pizzeria.

A society that does such an appalling job of protecting young women cannot be considered civilized or to have retained anything resembling manly virtue. The incident strikes me as a logical outcome in a society in which Marine veteran Daniel Penny was prosecuted for negligent homicide. Penny took action to protect people on a New York City subway from a deranged homeless man who was shouting “I’m gonna kill you” and other threats. Penny put the man in a chokehold that resulted in the man’s death, which sparked a major protest. The protestors believed that death threats do not warrant the use of force—that administering a chokehold is only justified after a violent attack has been initiated.

So far, no protests of the coldblooded murder of the innocent and unsuspecting girl. Of all major newspapers, only the New York Post has reported the incident, which is such a shameful horror show as to be almost beyond belief.

It seems the other major newspapers don’t consider the slaughter of a young woman on a public train to be newsworthy.

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