Start Date: September 16, 2025
Iryna Zarutska. She came for the American dream and it ended as an American nightmare.
A beautiful young girl from Ukraine.
She survived the Red Army attacks. But she couldn’t survive a progressive American city in North Carolina.
We are told that after living in a bomb shelter she, along with her mother and siblings, came to America in 2022 for a better future. She worked at a pizza parlor, with hopes to someday become a veterinary assistant [1].
She was coming home from work on August 22, 2025. Knowingly or not she had, according to an NYC police detective, done everything right. She had her hair back and made no eye contact with fellow travelers.
But the immigration officials or employers she dealt with must not have explained the hazards for women in America. I wrote about it in my post “The War on Women” [2].
The women in my previous post were also going home, or walking their dog, or doing something equally prosaic. Women of all races, ages, doing nothing more than existing are killed by every conceivable weapon, except a gun. No reason to waste the cost on a woman who can be killed by knife, or fist, or baseball bat, or hurled in front of a subway, or down the stairs. The options for a man are endless. Strangle, smother, or drown her, anything that only requires superior force. It is reminiscent of the baby boom era game “CLUE”, guessing the location and the weapon. The motive is truly none, as these attacks are random, unprovoked, and without sexual content.
So Ms. Zarutska got on the train to come home from work. A man in the seat behind her, with whom she had no encounter, stood up, pulled out a knife, reached over, and stabbed her to death. He is reported to have mumbled something about “Got the white girl.” Just another day in paradise in 21st century America. On any given day she may have had better odds in the bomb shelter in Ukraine.
As with most random attacks on women, the killers tend to fall into predictable categories that the social justice progressives exempt from rule of law until death occurs. These policies are neither just nor progress, except toward anarchy.
This killer qualified in at least 2, and maybe 3, criteria: mentally ill, minority, and I believe homeless. That allowed him to rack up a purported 14 felonies, probably more given the propensity to reduce charges in many districts. In the last case before the murder a magistrate, let him go on a written agreement, the legal equivalent of a pinky swear, that he come to his scheduled hearing [3]. Maybe he would have if he recalled. We will never know as there was still violence to be committed on the way.
The story was suppressed for some time, as the video is a screaming indictment of the everything-but justice system. The mayor asked people to not share the video and then made a statement that expressed her sadness for society failing the killer. It is true that they failed him. But they did it in a way that had significant collateral damage.
If the killer was a white man and the victim was a black girl, and he made murmurings about getting the black girl, Charlotte would be burning. If a white man killed a white woman we would have toxic masculinity to blame. If he used a gun the focus would be on gun control. But he didn’t.
Truthfully I suspect he probably suffers serious mental illness. I even feel pity that Charlotte didn’t care enough to incarcerate him so that this would not happen. Perhaps there would be a cure for his mental disease, a hope for redemption. We will never know.
I will plead guilty that this is really an amendment to my earlier post about female casualties. I suppose it is the international version of “Clue” or just a reminder to me that we have made no progress toward public spaces being physically safe for women.
I find the images of another sort of war crime come to mind.
In the latter part of her short life the late Princess Diana was actively engaged with the tragic consequences of land mines that remain long after the wars. They are explosive devices triggered by pressure or wires. They last until detonated, often by innocents who stumble upon them.
In America our land mines are of another form. They are the violent, mentally impaired but physically powerful, people who wander the streets until they explode on whomever is within their grasp. Iryna thought she was leaving a war zone to live in peace, only to die from a human IED left from the war on civilization.
RIP Iryna.
You briefly had the American life before it ended in an all too common American death.
REFERNCES
[1] Obituary for Iryna Zarutska, https://www.jamesfuneralhomelkn.com/obituaries/iryna-zarutska/obituary
[2] “The War on Women”, May 8, 2024, https://notcommonsense.com/the-war-on-women
[3] Yan, Holly, Smart, Sara, Gallagher, Dianne, Winter, Jeff, Blackman, Mia, and Sottile, Zoe, “Video shows fatal stabbing of Ukrainian refugee on Charlotte light rail — stirring debate on crime in major US cities”, September 8, 2025, https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/08/us/iryna-zarutska-murder-ukraine-refugee