By Editor,Tom Leonard

Copyright dailymail

She fled to the US for safety from her war-torn Ukrainian homeland, convinced America would offer the chance of a better life. Instead, Iryna Zarutska met a brutal fate that she wouldn’t have even expected from the Russians.

The young, beautiful and kind-hearted blonde who loved animals and dreamed of becoming a veterinary assistant had found a job in a pizza parlour in Charlotte, North Carolina, after emigrating with her mother and two siblings in 2022.

According to her family, she was a ‘gifted and passionate artist’ who’d ‘quickly embraced her new life in the United States’.

Then, on a Friday evening last month, she was returning home by train after a work shift when a deranged homeless man sitting right behind her pulled out a pocketknife and savagely stabbed her in the neck repeatedly.

CCTV footage from the light railway carriage showed her killer suddenly standing up, entirely unprovoked, then slashing the slightly-built refugee three times as she sat engrossed in her phone.

It shows the immediate aftermath of the six-second attack as – pulling up her legs to protect herself – she cowered away from the man in confusion and abject terror.

As he walked casually away, removing his blood-stained hoodie before getting off the train, fellow passengers tried to help the slumped Ms Zarutska but she was pronounced dead at the scene.

The bleak poignancy of her story – Iryna’s father cannot even attend her funeral as he is in Ukraine – and the horrific randomness of the violence displayed in the video has appalled millions across the world.

The level of outrage the murder has provoked makes many believe it may signal a turning point in America’s handling of violent criminals.

The August 22 killing has also become a major political issue after President Donald Trump and fellow Republicans blamed her death on the Democratic Party’s obsession with criminal justice reforms, which allow violent offenders to repeatedly walk free and continue to commit crime.

Other critics, including Elon Musk, have turned on the US media which they accuse of ignoring Ms Zarutska’s murder because she’s white and her alleged killer, Decarlos Brown Jr, is black.

Brown is just the sort of repeat offender who has flourished under Democrat-controlled Charlotte’s ‘cashless bail’ rules – now adopted in ‘blue’ cities across the US – that allow judges to free alleged criminals without making them put up bail.

The 34-year-old suspect, who according to his family suffers from mental health issues, has previously been arrested and released at least 14 times. Most of the charges, which included robbery with a dangerous weapon and threatening behaviour, were later dropped.

He served five years in prison for armed robbery, after which he went to live with his mother. She says he is a diagnosed schizophrenic who never should have been at large but insists she had to turn him out of her home when he became unstable and psychotic.

She had tried to get him sectioned in a psychiatric institution.

He’d been free to roam at will on a ‘written promise’ to the court that he would return for his next hearing – after being arrested for making a false 911 emergency call in January.

Brown’s father and older brother had both been imprisoned for violent crimes. His brother, Stacey, is serving 27 to 36 years in prison for murdering a 65-year-old man during a 2014 robbery.

His sister Tracey told the Daily Mail she had tried to get Brown admitted to hospital several times over the past few years, as his mental health crumbled, but doctors kept discharging him after just 24 hours.

She shared a recording of her phone conversation with him in jail – in which he told her the government had implanted ‘materials’ in his brain which ‘stabbed the lady’.

Republicans, however, are less impressed by the accused’s mental health problems and more concerned about protecting innocent victims like Iryna Zarutska.

To drive home this point, Trump’s Department of Justice has charged Brown with a federal crime, causing death on a mass transportation system, which makes him eligible for the death penalty.

Attorney General Pamela Bondi said the department would seek the maximum penalty and that he would ‘never again see the light of day as a free man’.

She said that Ms Zarutska’s ‘horrific murder is a direct result of failed soft-on-crime policies that put criminals before innocent people’. Some have noted online that Iryna was the only white person sitting in Brown’s vicinity on the train but he has not been charged with a hate crime.

It was on Monday that Trump stepped into the growing furore over the killing when he branded the murderer a ‘lunatic’ and called for the US to do more to confront ‘evil people’ and violent crime.

He attacked the ‘cashless bail’ system, which he wants to end across the US, and blamed his political opponents in North Carolina for the death, saying ‘her blood is on the hands of the Democrats who refuse to put bad people in jail’.

The White House published an accompanying statement, saying the fatal attack was the consequence of politicians, prosecutors and judges who are ‘prioritising woke agendas’.

This is a familiar complaint of conservatives who, with some success, have painted Democrats as soft on crime – and particularly when the perpetrators are black or Hispanic.

It’s also a similar belief that America’s mainstream media prefers to play down ethnic-minority crime.

In the latest case, critics noted that major news outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and BBC didn’t report on the murder for several weeks – despite it being covered in the state’s local media and on other sites including DailyMail.com.

Elon Musk – a former member of Trump’s administration and frequent critic of Left-wing politics on his social media platform X – joined other conservatives in contrasting the vast media coverage of Minneapolis black man George Floyd’s 2020 killing by a white policeman with that of Ms Zarutska’s.

Others – more relevantly – compared the media’s slow response to the Zarutska murder with the uproar when a white ex-Marine, Daniel Penny, accidentally killed a mentally-disturbed black homeless man in a chokehold after he threatened passengers in a New York subway car in 2023.

Last December, a Manhattan court acquitted Penny of homicide.

Musk reposted a comment on X giving a long list of media outlets who’d ignored the Zarutska murder but reported on Daniel Penny, the New York Times – which had topped the list and whose motto is ‘All the news that’s fit to print’ – finally published a story.

In what appeared to be an excuse for the delay, the newspaper reported that the ‘brutal killing did not capture widespread attention until the security footage was released on Friday’.

However, opponents are not convinced. ‘If Iryna were black and her killer was white, the media would be rioting non-stop,’ said Benny Johnson, an American conservative podcaster who is reportedly influential with Trump. ‘But because she’s white, they stay silent.’

Charlotte’s mayor Vi Lyles, a Democrat, was initially criticised after she called for compassion for mentally ill people such as Brown who, she said, ‘appears to have suffered a crisis’.

Lyles has since said the killing was ‘a tragic failure by the courts and magistrates’, and pledged to increase patrols and police numbers on public transportation.

Trump and his allies are undoubtedly ramping up fear of crime as a weapon to beat the Democrats, but years of misguided ‘progressive’ policies have certainly made it easy for them.

Meanwhile, Iryna’s family have been left to wonder how life might have been if they’d stayed in Kyiv.

‘We are heartbroken beyond words,’ they said in a statement on Tuesday. ‘Iryna came here to find peace and safety, and instead her life was stolen from her in the most horrific way.