Let a murder remind you

On Aug. 22, young Iryna Zarutska walked on to a light rail train in Charlotte, N.C., and sat down for what would be her last ride. Like so many of us, she disappeared into a cocoon of her earbuds and her phone. Before she could reach her destination and walk off the train, she was savagely killed without provocation. DeCarlos Brown, Jr., sitting one row behind her, pulled out a folding knife, opened it, stood up behind her, and struck with lethal force. Her life ended at 23 years of age.

Iryna was a refugee from the war in her native Ukraine, surviving in her new country by working for a pizzeria and doing other odd jobs. She did not know Mr. Brown, nor did he know her. We do not know exactly what possessed him to kill her, but to see the videos or the photo of him rising up behind her like some murderous wraith in a hoodie brings forth a visceral response.

My personal reaction has been especially intense because I was once a victim of a similar attack. One afternoon in high school, I walked innocently down a hallway only to be struck so hard behind my ear I never felt the blow. Like a puppet whose strings had been cut, I simply dropped to the floor unconscious. Perhaps it had something to do with my own eventual conversion to Christianity that the young woman who emerged out of the crowd of onlookers to help me to my feet when I woke and to walk me to a place where she could find help was one of the few public Christians I knew at my school. In any case, I think I’ve maintained a heightened situational awareness ever since that day.

But we look at poor Iryna. She had no chance to defend herself. She did not know the attack was coming. After she’d been fatally struck with the blade, the picture of her that remains is of a woman who has been dealt a terminal cut and doesn’t realize it. She is protectively curled up, staring in fear at the man who has stabbed her. It is a deeply pathetic and pitiful image. And what of this man? One might almost imagine his rationality and reason caught in some reptilian deathroll and pulled below the surface. Is it madness, possession, or sociopathic malevolence? We don’t know. Perhaps we never will.

One thing is clear. This brutal and disgusting murder carried out in a brazen fashion should help us to refocus on the essential core of government. Martin Luther wrote that God mercifully provides us with government to engage in the restraint and punishment of those who would do evil. We can get so tied up in the many facets of public policy such as retirement, health care, diversity measures, higher education, climate change, and more that we forget what government must do in order to be effective. And what government must do is to maintain order by preventing as much crime as it can and punishing the crime it cannot prevent.

There was a time in the 1970s and ’80s when some wondered whether New York City had become an ungovernable place. Those who grew up in the city during those days found it common to be mugged at least a couple of times. But then came Rudy Giuliani, a prosecutor who had successfully taken on the mob. He embraced the broken windows theory of policing, which holds that in order to control crime it is not enough to win the big battles. You have to win the small ones. You have to keep the chaos at bay down to the level of fixing windows and keeping them from being broken. You have to stop giving graffiti artists free reign.

Mayor Bloomberg largely continued Giuliani’s approach to crime and policing. The city became noticeably safer, but heightened vigilance brought about a response and a countermovement. The American left began to battle for changes to the criminal justice system such as “cashless bail” and substantially higher valuations of stolen goods required to trigger a felony charge. These measures have taken a toll and have sent the wrong message to criminal elements who need to understand that the government will be vigilant rather than lenient in its core task.

Would a return to a higher level of conviction in law enforcement have saved Iryna Zarutska on Aug. 22? We can never know, though Decarlos Brown’s freedom after 14 arrests suggests an answer. But one thing is almost certain. If we commit ourselves to reducing our tolerance for crime and chaos and increasing our response to it, many potential victims will be protected by an umbrella of determination and sure punishment for those who do evil. Government is force applied in the service of justice. We shouldn’t forget it.