The string of recent killings, from Annunciation Church to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, are not unrelated.
Scott Ventureyra
On August 22, 2025, Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian, was murdered on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina, after finishing a shift at a local pizzeria. She had fled her homeland in the hope of a brighter future in a supposedly safer country. A chilling surveillance video captures the moment she was stabbed from behind—three savage thrusts to her neck as she quietly scrolled her phone—before she collapsed in shock and bled out on the train floor. No one stepped forward to help until it was much too late. Within minutes, the attacker, Decarlos Brown Jr., exited the train, walking away with a bloody knife.
Brown, a career criminal with 14 prior arrests, including armed robbery and domestic violence, was a clear danger. He suffered from paranoid delusions about “foreign materials” in his brain and called 911 repeatedly in psychotic distress. Yet, in January, Magistrate Judge Teresa Stokes released him on nothing more than a written promise to appear. He was released without bail, with no confinement, and no treatment. That decision sealed Iryna’s fate.
Her murder was horrific in itself, but the greater scandal is that mainstream America barely noticed. The silence was deafening. By contrast, her workplace, Zeppedies Pizzeria, responded with dignity: keeping her memory alive with a lit candle, a quiet symbol of her warmth and kindness. In a society that has largely abandoned truth, it was ordinary people, not elites, who bore witness to her worth.
And now, as I was working on this piece about Iryna, news broke of Charlie Kirk’s death. I began following the developments in shock, and I could not help but widen this reflection into a global theme—two tragic losses bound together: the slaughter of a young Ukrainian refugee who came seeking peace; and the assassination of a Christian conservative voice and defender of free speech in America, a husband and father now torn from his family.
A video posted on 𝕏 shows the shooting occurring moments after Kirk had been asked a question from the audience: “Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters in the past ten years?” to which he replied, “Too many.” The questioner pressed, “Five. Now five is a lot; I’ll give you credit. Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last ten years?” Kirk responded, “Counting or not counting gang violence?” And then—in a grim twist of fate, he was shot viciously in the neck. The irony is inescapable. Only days earlier, I had written on the disturbing links between transgender ideology, violence, and murder in an article titled “Gender Ideology and Violence: Cultural Confusion and the Spiritual Battle.” Kirk’s death, unfolding in that very context, makes the point in blood.
These are not isolated sorrows but twin revelations of a world increasingly gripped by darkness.
