Court records unsealed this week reveal that a Charlotte man accused of killing a young Ukrainian immigrant aboard a city light-rail train has been ruled mentally incompetent, throwing his criminal case into uncertainty.
Decarlos Brown Jr., 34, stands charged with the murder of Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee who bled to death on the Lynx Blue Line on August 22, 2025, after being stabbed from behind while seated in a train car.
Psychiatric staff at Central Regional Hospital, where Brown was sent for evaluation, concluded in their formal report that he is “incapable to proceed” to trial on the murder charge.
Brown, who was living without stable housing at the time of the alleged attack, carries a diagnosis of schizophrenia and is currently held in a federal detention facility on charges unrelated to Zarutska’s death.
His defense attorneys moved this week to push back a scheduled April 30 court date, telling the judge that restoring Brown’s legal competency — a necessary step before trial can proceed — is not possible under the conditions of his current federal confinement.
That motion, if granted, will add months to an already complicated legal timeline as Brown awaits yet another round of psychiatric testing.
Long before Zarutska ever boarded that train, Brown had been cycling through the region’s emergency response systems. Government records show authorities had logged no fewer than six contacts with Brown by March 2024 alone, many triggered by 911 calls Brown himself placed, according to The New York Times.
One of those calls came from inside Novant Presbyterian Hospital, where Brown told a dispatcher he urgently needed help extracting a “man-made” material he believed had been placed inside him to control his movements, the Charlotte Observer reported.
Responding officers told him there was nothing they could do, and left, the Charlotte Observer reported.
That theme — of external forces commandeering his body — would resurface days after Zarutska’s death, when Brown picked up a jail phone and called his sister. The Daily Mail obtained a recording of that conversation.
In it, Brown told his sister he had no explanation for why he stabbed the 23-year-old, attributing the violence to government-implanted “materials” lodged inside his brain.
“They just lashed out on her, that’s what happened,” Brown said. “Whoever was working the materials they lashed out on her. That’s all there is to it. Now they really gotta investigate what my body was exposed to… Now they gotta do an investigation as to who was the motive behind what happened.”
Security cameras inside the train car recorded what happened in the minutes before the stabbing. The footage shows Zarutska walking onto the train and sitting down directly ahead of Brown.
Four minutes passed. Brown then reached into his pocket, produced a knife, and stabbed Zarutska three times from behind. He stepped off the train without her. She never left.
Zarutska was pronounced dead where she sat. Officers arrested Brown on the platform minutes later.
Family members have since told reporters that Brown’s struggles with mental illness go back many years and were well known to those close to him.
He now faces a dual legal track — charges at both the state and federal level. A U.S. magistrate judge has separately ordered a second federal psychiatric exam before his federal case can move forward, according to the Charlotte Observer.
His attorneys have asked the state court to stand down for six months. Prosecutors have not opposed the request. As of publication, Brown’s legal team had not responded to media requests for comment.
