Every day, millions of Americans board public transit operating under a pretty basic assumption: you buy your ticket, you follow the rules, and the city makes a bare-minimum effort to keep you alive during the ride. That assumption is crumbling. When local governments stop enforcing fares, gut security staffing, and let dangerous individuals wander freely through the system, they aren’t making some bold progressive statement. They’re gambling with human lives.

And when every institution that had a chance to step in – courts, hospitals, transit authorities – collectively shrugs, the bill eventually comes due. Not for the bureaucrats. For someone riding home after a long shift, minding her own business, on a Friday night in Charlotte.

From The Post Millennial:

The family of Iryna Zarutska has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the City of Charlotte and its private transit security contractor, alleging that failures within the city’s light rail system contributed to her fatal stabbing last year.

The lawsuit, filed one day before the first anniversary of Zarutska’s death, names Charlotte and Professional Security Services, which provides security for the Charlotte Area Transit System. Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee, was fatally stabbed while riding the Lynx Blue Line on August 22, 2025.

The Zarutska family deserves every dollar this lawsuit seeks – and then some. Iryna Zarutska was everything we say we value in this country: a legal immigrant, a young woman finishing a shift at a local pizzeria, a fare-paying rider who played by every rule. She sat down on that train. Minutes later, she was stabbed in the neck by a man who had no business being within a mile of her.

Her family’s attorney, Lauren Newton, didn’t mince words: “If there had been a security guard on that train, Iryna Zarutska would be here.”

A system that chose not to function

Charlotte’s transit system didn’t just fail Iryna Zarutska. It had been rehearsing this failure for years. The lawsuit details a light rail network with no physical barriers preventing anyone – ticketed or otherwise – from walking straight onto a train. Bus drivers had been explicitly told not to confront riders who skipped the fare. A 2022 hidden camera investigation revealed that half the fareboxes on Charlotte buses were broken.

DeCarlos Brown Jr. walked through every gap. He boarded a city bus without paying, transferred at the Charlotte Transportation Center, and rode the Lynx Blue Line for over an hour before the attack. Not one security officer, transit worker, or fare enforcer so much as glanced his way.

Here’s the staffing reality. The contract with Professional Security Services budgeted for 219 security positions and 39 armed guards. On the day Zarutska died, PSS had 183 total personnel and a grand total of 11 armed guards. A recent report from North Carolina State Auditor Dave Boliek confirmed exactly what the lawsuit alleges – sweeping gaps in security and fare enforcement across the entire system.

Fourteen arrests and counting

Brown carried a rap sheet stretching back to 2007. Fourteen arrests in Mecklenburg County. Convictions for breaking and entering and armed robbery. A prison sentence from 2015 to 2020. His mother told ABC News he’d been diagnosed with schizophrenia and was growing increasingly erratic and violent. She tried to have him involuntarily committed. The system said no.

Seven months before the killing, Brown called 911 from outside a hospital, insisting that a “man-made material” inside him was controlling his body. Authorities charged him with misuse of 911 and released him without bond. After the fatal stabbing, Brown was reportedly captured saying: “I got that white girl.”

Fourteen encounters. Fourteen chances to intervene. Fourteen passes.

The contracting question nobody wants to ask

So why was the security operation so hollowed out? The lawsuit raises a pointed allegation: Charlotte’s security contract was “targeted only to businesses that were registered and certified with the City’s Charlotte Business Inclusion program.” PSS is a CBI-certified minority business. The city moved away from major national security firms and handed the contract to a company that couldn’t meet its own staffing benchmarks. Whether identity-based procurement priorities compromised public safety is a question Charlotte will now have to answer under oath. Good.

A family’s only path forward

Brown has since been ruled incompetent to stand trial. Criminal accountability may never materialize. This lawsuit represents the Zarutska family’s sole avenue for justice – and their best chance at forcing changes so no other family endures what they have.

Iryna Zarutska followed every rule America asked of her. The least the system owed her was a safe ride home.

Key Takeaways

• Charlotte’s transit system had zero fare enforcement and critically understaffed security when Zarutska was murdered
• Her killer had fourteen prior arrests and documented severe mental illness – every institution failed to act
• The lawsuit alleges Charlotte prioritized diversity-certified contracting over proven public safety capability
• The Zarutska family’s civil suit may be their only path to accountability after Brown was ruled incompetent

Sources: The Post Millennial