A few days after he was charged with stabbing a young woman to death on a commuter train in Charlotte, N.C., Decarlos Brown Jr. called his sister from jail. Finally, he told her, the authorities would have no choice but to deal with a foreign material in his body that had caused him to attack a stranger.
“I don’t even know the lady,” he explained. “I never said not one word to the lady at all. That’s scary, ain’t it? So, like, why would somebody just stab somebody for no reason?”
The killing of Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old who had fled the war in Ukraine, unleashed a torrent of outrage over the fact that Mr. Brown, who had a long history of arrests and mental illness, had been walking free. President Trump blamed “radical left judges” and “Democrat-run cities that set loose savage, bloodthirsty criminals.”
A thorough examination of Mr. Brown’s history with the police, courts and mental health providers tells a far more complex story. He was prosecuted by both Democratic and Republican district attorneys, in a state where a Republican legislature has controlled the criminal statutes for 15 years.
More consequentially, Mr. Brown had been diagnosed with a severe mental illness, schizophrenia, that police departments, jails and even mental health systems across the country are ill equipped to handle. His family believed he was too dangerous to live at home. But under state law, he was not considered dangerous enough to be treated against his will.
Stephen Eide, a policy analyst with the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, said the left’s concerns about civil liberties have set too high a bar for involuntary psychiatric commitment, while the right’s concerns about spending have kept the number of treatment beds too low — “a bipartisan catastrophe,” he said. North Carolina ranks 36th in the nation for the number of psychiatric beds per capita.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The post N.C. Stabbing Suspect Had Many Interactions With Police and Little Treatment appeared first on New York Times.
