A chilling video call holds the key to a Ukrainian refugee’s brutal murder.
Iryna Zarutska, a young artist who fled war for a new life, shared a haunting final chat with her best friend just MINUTES before her life was cut short on a Charlotte train. What she said—and what she feared—could unravel why this tragedy was so sudden and horrific. The truth will leave you speechless. Click to discover the shocking details that are shaking a city.
Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee with a radiant smile and a passion for sketching animals, carried the weight of war’s scars when she arrived in North Carolina three years ago. She had survived Russian airstrikes in Kyiv, cradling her younger siblings in a bomb shelter, dreaming of a safer life. But on August 22, 2025, aboard a Lynx Blue Line train in Charlotte, that dream ended in a spray of blood and a killer’s cold precision. Now, a newly uncovered video call—her last to her best friend, Olena Kovalenko, just hours before the attack—offers haunting hints about why her death was so sudden, so brutal, and perhaps not as random as police first believed. As federal investigators dig into the grainy footage and cryptic words Iryna shared, the case of her stabbing has taken a chilling turn, exposing a web of fear that may have trailed her across the Atlantic.
The attack, captured on grainy train surveillance, unfolded at 9:46 p.m. as Iryna rode home from her shift at Zepeddie’s Pizzeria, her khaki pants dusted with flour, her dark shirt clinging to her frame in the humid Carolina night. She sat near the front of the railcar, scrolling her phone, perhaps texting her boyfriend, Stas Nikulytsia, or watching pet videos, a nod to her goal of becoming a veterinary assistant. Four seats back, Decarlos Brown Jr., a 34-year-old Charlotte local, sat hunched in a red hoodie, his face unreadable. Without warning, he lunged, driving a pocket knife into her neck and torso three times. Passengers froze as blood streaked the floor; Iryna collapsed, clutching her throat, her gasps fading as the train screeched to a stop at East/West Boulevard. Paramedics couldn’t save her. Brown, with priors for assault, was arrested blocks away, the blade still in his pocket, now facing federal murder charges and a possible death penalty push from prosecutors.
Initially, Charlotte-Mecklenburg police called it a random act—a drifter’s snap of rage on a city train. “No motive, no robbery, no words exchanged,” Chief Johnny Jennings told reporters at a tense August press conference, his voice heavy with the city’s exhaustion over urban violence. But the discovery of Iryna’s final video call, handed over to investigators by Kovalenko last week, has flipped the narrative. The call, placed at 6:12 p.m. from the pizzeria’s break room, lasted 22 minutes and showed Iryna in her usual high spirits—until it didn’t. “She looked nervous, kept glancing at the door,” Kovalenko, a 24-year-old barista in Raleigh, told the Charlotte Observer in a tearful interview. “She said, ‘Olena, something’s off. I feel eyes on me—like back in Kyiv when we hid.’ She wouldn’t say more, just that she’d explain later.”
Kovalenko, who fled Ukraine with Iryna’s family in 2022, said her friend mentioned a “weird call” from an unknown number two days earlier, demanding she “pay up” for her uncle’s debts—money allegedly owed to wartime smugglers who’d helped her family escape. “Iryna laughed it off, said it was probably a scam,” Kovalenko recalled, twisting a tissue in her hands. “But her eyes weren’t laughing. She said, ‘If anything happens, tell Stas I love him.’ I thought she was being dramatic.” The call ended with Iryna promising to text after her shift. She never did.
Federal investigators, now leading the probe due to the transit system’s jurisdiction, are dissecting the video frame by frame. A source close to the case, speaking anonymously, told WSOC-TV that Iryna’s mention of “eyes” aligns with new evidence: grainy CCTV from Scaleybark station showing Brown lingering on the platform three nights prior, watching women in uniforms disembark. Text messages from his burner phone, recovered last month, further darken the picture. One, sent August 19 to an untraceable number, read: “Blonde, khakis, pizza place. Got the route.” Another, from a contact labeled “Ghost,” replied: “Do it clean. No chatter.” The messages, authenticated by T-Mobile’s forensics team, suggest Brown wasn’t acting alone—and that Iryna was targeted well before she boarded that train.
The implications are staggering. Was Iryna, who’d rebuilt her life from Kyiv’s ashes, hunted for reasons tied to her past? Her family, now scattered across Huntersville and Ukraine, insists she had no enemies. “Iryna was light—pure light,” her mother, Anna, said via Zoom from Kyiv, her voice breaking. “She painted, walked dogs, loved her new home. Why her?” Her father, Stanislav, stuck in Ukraine under martial law, sent a written statement to the Associated Press: “She escaped missiles to die by a knife. America promised safety. Where was it?” Her siblings, Valeriia, 20, and Bohdan, 18, have turned grief to action, pushing a Change.org petition for AI-powered train cameras that’s hit 60,000 signatures. “She survived war,” Bohdan tweeted, retweeted by figures like Sen. Thom Tillis. “We won’t let her die in vain.”
Charlotte’s Ukrainian community, some 2,000 strong, is reeling. A vigil at Romare Bearden Park last Sunday drew hundreds, clutching sunflowers—Iryna’s favorite—and blue-yellow flags. “She was our sister,” said organizer Oksana Melnyk, a UNCC grad student who knew Iryna from ESL classes. “We fled death to find it here.” The tragedy has amplified calls for refugee protections, with Rep. Alma Adams (D-N.C.) meeting Ukrainian leaders to discuss transit safety and visa extensions. “Iryna Zarutska deserved better,” Adams said in a statement. “Her death demands we rethink how we shield the vulnerable.”
Brown’s defense, led by public defender Carla Ruiz, is floundering. An insanity plea, floated early citing his schizophrenia history, crumbled against the texts’ cold calculation. Prosecutors, backed by Attorney General Pam Bondi, are building a RICO case, suspecting Brown was a hired hand in an extortion ring targeting Eastern European immigrants. A second phone, found in a dumpster off Tryon Street, yielded partial prints and a SIM linked to a Gastonia pawn shop. “Ghost” remains at large, but FBI chatter points to a Ukrainian diaspora figure with ties to black-market loans—a shadow of Kyiv’s war economy stretching to the Carolinas. “This wasn’t random,” U.S. Attorney Emily Sproull told a federal judge last week. “It was a contract, plain and simple.”
The video call’s fallout has gripped Charlotte, where transit ridership has dipped 10% since the attack’s viral footage—a 15-second clip of Brown’s blade flashing under LED lights—hit X and TikTok. Mayor Vi Lyles, facing reelection heat, fast-tracked $3 million for CATS security: more cameras, armed guards, panic buttons. “We can’t let fear win,” she said at a tense city council meeting, though riders like Tamika Jones, a nurse who takes the Blue Line daily, aren’t convinced. “I double-check every face now,” Jones told reporters, clutching her purse at New Bern station. “That girl could’ve been me.”
Iryna’s life was a patchwork of resilience. Born in 2002, she’d earned an art restoration degree from Kyiv’s Synergy College, sketching church frescoes between air raid sirens. In Huntersville, she thrived—taking community college classes, slinging pizzas, saving for a used Kia with Stas. Her Instagram, now memorialized, shows her grinning with coworkers, captioned “New home, new heart.” Neighbors recall her walking dogs, her ponytail bouncing, always pausing to chat. “She’d bring me extra breadsticks,” said retiree Helen Greer, 68, leaving a stuffed puppy at Iryna’s mural in NoDa—a vibrant sunflower tribute buzzing with life.
The case’s political undertow is fierce. Right-wing X accounts, including one tied to Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, cast the murder as proof of “Biden’s open-border chaos,” though Iryna entered legally via Uniting for Ukraine. Progressives counter that systemic gaps—underfunded transit, lax mental health care—failed her. President Trump’s Truth Social post, “Another angel lost to Democrat cities,” drew 1.4 million views, while Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted back: “Don’t exploit a refugee’s death for votes. Fund safety.” Ukraine’s embassy, cautious, issued a muted call for “justice and prevention.”
As October looms, Brown’s arraignment nears, with a gag order barely holding against leaks. Iryna’s family sues CATS for $12 million, alleging negligence in spotting Brown’s casing. Stas, hollow-eyed, clutches her sketchbooks, vowing to finish her vet tech dream. “She saw me,” he whispered at her gravesite, per a family friend’s account to WBTV. “Now I see her in everything.” In Huntersville, purple ribbons flutter; in Kyiv, her father toasts her photo with vodka, eyes fixed on justice. That video call—22 minutes of laughter, then dread—holds the weight of a life cut short, its clues a map to a truth Charlotte can’t unsee.