By Rachel Crumpler
Exactly one month after 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee, was fatally stabbed while riding the Charlotte light rail on Aug. 22 — a crime that garnered statewide and national attention — Republican state lawmakers on Monday introduced a bill dubbed “Iryna’s Law” that they say will make North Carolina safer. The legislation sailed through both chambers of the General Assembly over two days and was sent to Gov. Josh Stein Tuesday.
House Bill 307 makes it more difficult for people who have committed violent offenses or who are exhibiting signs of mental illness to be released before going to trial. The legislation also requires more defendants be sent for mental health evaluations to determine if they should be involuntarily committed — a legal tool used to hold patients against their will for psychiatric treatment. Other provisions include eliminating cashless bail, directing the North Carolina Collaboratory to study the intersection of mental health and the justice system for adults and juveniles, and reviving the death penalty.
The contents of the bill are heavily shaped by the background of 34-year-old Decarlos Brown Jr., the man charged in Zarutska’s death who was homeless and living with schizophrenia.
“We believe this does make North Carolina safer and does help to promote law and order in the state of North Carolina, but we do have more work to do on involuntary commitments and mental health in the space of the criminal justice system,” said Sen. Danny Britt (R-Lumberton), a criminal defense attorney who introduced the bill during committee meetings and is co-chairperson of the Senate Appropriations on Justice and Public Safety Committee.
The case has sparked a wave of calls for reform, drawing renewed attention to public safety and mental health issues in North Carolina.
In the aftermath of the killing, President Donald Trump and top Republican state leaders have blamed what they characterize as Democratic “soft-on-crime” policies that they argue allow people with mental illnesses to be free on the streets at a risk to public safety. Iryna’s Law is the Republicans’ response, focusing heavily on judicial reforms. But mental health experts say what’s just as urgently needed are investments in upstream, community mental health resources.
“It’s a heavy lift to fix this,” said Victor Armstrong, former director of mental health at the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services who now works for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. “Unfortunately, you have legislators looking for a quick win.”
Aside from more than $2 million to fund more assistant district attorneys and legal assistants in Mecklenburg County and up to $1 million to fund a study of mental health and the justice system, the bill does not allocate any more funding to bolster mental health services in the community or in jails — what some view as a critical flaw.
Long-time gaps in care
Over the past two decades, Brown had repeated encounters with North Carolina’s mental health and criminal justice systems, including more than a dozen arrests — several of which were low-level misdemeanors. In 2015, Brown was convicted of armed robbery and sent to prison, where he served more than five years before his release on Sept. 20, 2020.
Brown’s mother, Michelle Dewitt, told ABC News that his mental health deteriorated in the years after he returned from prison. Concerned about his behavior, Dewitt said she tried to get him help, including obtaining an involuntary commitment order from a magistrate that resulted in Brown being kept at a mental health facility for 14 days.
Brown’s three most recent arrests — two in 2024 and one this year — were all for misusing the 911 system, a low-level misdemeanor. A police incident report shows Brown repeatedly called 911 from Novant Health Presbyterian Medical Center on Jan. 19; he was arrested when he called 911 again and asked to speak to different officers while responding officers were still on the scene, according to the report. Brown reportedly told officers that “man-made” material was inside his body, controlling his actions.
He was released from the Mecklenburg County Detention Center later that day on a written promise to appear — a move by a magistrate that has been heavily criticized, despite the decision appearing to adhere to the county’s bail guidelines and state law.
On July 28, a judge signed an order for Brown to appear at Alliance Health for the local forensic evaluators to assess his competency to stand trial. But the evaluation never happened, court records show.
Seven months after his misdemeanor arrest, Brown was arrested for fatally stabbing Zarutska, an apparent stranger seated in front of him on a light rail train. In a recorded jail call with his sister, Tracey Brown, obtained by ABC News after his arrest, he tells her that “material” in his body caused him to attack Zarutska.
“At the end of the day, I’m not making any excuse for what happened,” Tracey Brown told ABC News. “I am saying that if he had the proper care this wouldn’t have happened.”
While people working in North Carolina’s mental health and criminal justice systems appreciate that people’s eyes are on gaps in the system, they said they have long existed. They say Decarlos Brown isn’t an anomaly, rather, he is representative of common issues such as lack of mental health providers in the community, carceral settings that are ill-equipped to address mental health treatment needs, and no consistency of care upon release — factors that fuel a revolving door of people with mental illness through the justice system.
The fixes won’t necessarily be easy, fast or cheap, stakeholders told NC Health News.
“I don’t think this is just this one incident where there were opportunities to identify an individual that had a history of mental illness,” said Harold Cogdell Jr., a defense attorney and former assistant district attorney at the Mecklenburg County District Attorney’s Office. “This is a challenge that our justice system has faced for years, that our communities have faced for years, that is multi-layered.”
Apryl Alexander, director of UNC Charlotte’s Violence Prevention Center who has previously worked inside detention centers, said that many of the provisions lawmakers have put forth are reactive, rather than focused on proactive interventions that could prevent people from committing crimes.
“Pre-trial reform,” Alexander said, “that’s after the crime has happened. There’s reinvigorated conversations around the death penalty. Again, the crime has already happened. How do we engage in better prevention?
“How are we addressing the homeless crisis? How are we addressing mental health in our communities? All of those things will help contribute to incidents like this going down, so I hope that we get into a space of, right now, in this moment, thinking about better ways of prevention.”
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Intersecting mental health and justice systems
Statistics show that most people living with mental illnesses are not violent, and research shows they are more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators.
Nonetheless, Mecklenburg County Sheriff Garry McFadden, who has been in law enforcement for more than four decades, said he encounters people similar to Brown — those with serious mental health conditions — every day.
Of the roughly 1,500 people in Mecklenburg County’s jail, McFadden said that more than 600 people have a diagnosed mental health condition. About 180 people are considered to have severe conditions, such as schizophrenia, that can cause delusions, hallucinations and self-harm. While the jail population is constantly in flux, McFadden said many of the individuals who most frequently cycle in and out have a mental health diagnosis.
“Brown is a representative of what we have in our criminal justice system that is on the streets of our cities everywhere,” McFadden told NC Health News.
Data shows that people with mental illnesses are disproportionately represented in incarcerated, probationary and paroled populations nationwide. In part, this overrepresentation can be driven by a lack of accessible community mental health services, which often results in law enforcement becoming the default responders to mental health crises. In many cases, this can lead to arrests for minor offenses related to symptoms of untreated or poorly managed mental illness.
McFadden said he can drive around Charlotte on any given day and see people who appear to be struggling with a mental illness, identifiable by the way they are talking or carrying themselves. He said many will ultimately be arrested for crimes such as petty theft, trespassing or public urination that will lead to them spending time in jail.
“When that person is here [in jail], if they don’t want to take medication, we can’t force them,” McFadden said. “We can give them the avenue to take it, but then they may not. Then what happens is, the person is here on a petty crime, we’re going to let him back out, and they’re going to go back to the streets.
“The streets are depressing, and so unchecked mental health produces petty crime that could produce violent crimes.”
Tightening pre-trial release
House Bill 307 tightens pre-trial release rules, meaning more people will likely be held in jails — and for longer periods of time. Jails will be left scrambling to find ways to provide the needed mental health treatment to more people in their custody, without additional resources.
In recent years, jails have become de facto mental health institutions, and it’s not what they were designed to do. McFadden said he’s tried to do what he can to bolster mental health support inside the facility, such as creating a dedicated behavioral health unit, but he’s quick to admit a jail is not the best place to provide this treatment.
“We are a law enforcement correctional facility,” McFadden said. “This is not a forensic psychiatric hospital, but people want us to be treated that way.”
McFadden said keeping people longer in jails, especially those with mental illnesses, must come with the necessary resources and funds.
No new funding has been allocated by state or federal lawmakers so far.
Despite this, North Carolina Sheriffs’ Association Executive Vice President and General Counsel Eddie Caldwell voiced his support for the legislation.
“Reforms are clearly needed in our mental health system and in our criminal justice system,” Caldwell said during a meeting of the Senate Judiciary committee on Sept. 22. “House Bill 307 is a good first step in ensuring that those in our communities that are mentally ill are in mental hospitals and not in jails, and those that are dangerous criminals are in jails and not out on the street.”
The bill makes numerous changes to North Carolina’s pre-trial release system — a system that many critics have blamed for Zarutska’s death, arguing that Brown should have not been free in the community given his criminal history. Although, even if Brown had been held in jail to serve the maximum sentence for his misdemeanor charge, he still would have been released before Zarutska’s murder.
Under current law, after a person is arrested, a magistrate or judge is tasked with deciding whether they can be released while they await trial. Conditions for release can include a written promise to appear, an unsecured appearance bond, placement in the custody of a designated person or supervising organization, a secured cash bond, or house arrest with electronic monitoring.
House Bill 307 eliminates the written “promise to appear” option. Defendants charged with a violent offense or found to have mental health issues will be held to a different set of release standards.
Jason St. Aubin, a criminal defense attorney in Charlotte, said keeping people in custody longer simply because they have a mental health issue, could be counterproductive.
“It would seem like that would be an approach that would lead to an overuse of police resources on a problem that medical resources could treat so much better,” said St. Aubin, who has represented people with serious mental illnesses who have committed felonies.
The bill also would require magistrates and judges to consider new criteria when making pre-trial release decisions. For example, they would need to consider a defendant’s housing situation, among other factors — a direct response to the case of Brown, who was homeless.
North Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Paul Newby has also assembled a Pretrial Release Task Force to conduct a statewide review of practice and procedures and “whether the current framework adequately protects the public.”
Actions to curtail pre-trial release must also come with treatment because most people will one day be released, St. Aubin said.
“It’s not a matter of just setting a bond and saying, ‘As a magistrate, I want to keep this person in custody,’” St. Aubin said. “It’s a matter of creating some ways of getting that person some help when you do that, so you have kind of a one-two punch of, ‘I see this, I am going to set some kind of bond on this person to make sure that there’s no danger to the community. But I’m also not just gonna cast them aside like they’re a leper or have some really terrible issue. I’m gonna make sure they get the treatment and help that they need to rejoin society.’”
More involuntary commitments
House Bill 307 also requires more mental health evaluations to determine if people who are arrested should be involuntarily committed to receive forced treatment at a psychiatric facility.
The bill mandates that law enforcement officers take someone to an emergency department for a psychiatric evaluation if the officer determines the person has mental health issues. If someone is charged with a violent offense and also has been subject to an involuntary commitment order in the past three years, officers are also required to take the person to hospital for psychiatric evaluation.
“So there’s going to be a bunch of people who were just arrested, who are agitated, who are not calm, who are going to be taken to emergency departments. I can’t imagine that every hospital isn’t going to be worried about what this is going to mean for their staffing,” said Corye Dunn, policy director at Disability Rights NC.
Dunn predicts this bill will lead to more overcrowding in jails and undue strain on emergency departments and psychiatric facilities. She said there’s already a large number of state psychiatric hospital beds filled with people who are ready to be discharged, but there are no community-based services to discharge them to.
“It’s not helpful to just add more people to the queue until we actually build out the community-based mental health service system,” Dunn said. “Which I recognize doesn’t feel politically appealing for [legislative] members in this moment in an effort to respond to the Charlotte tragedy.”
Involuntary commitments are used to stabilize a person when they are a danger to themselves or others. Once the patient no longer meets that criteria, by state law, they must be released. Bob Ward, who spent the last 11 years of his career representing people in Mecklenburg County with mental illness in their involuntary commitment hearings, said that civil commitments are “useless” if the right treatment and supportive services are not available to a person when they are released.
During a Senate Judiciary committee meeting on Monday, Liz Barber, ACLU of North Carolina’s director of policy and advocacy, called the involuntary commitment process “a road to nowhere” if there are no mental health supports in the community.
In the case of Decarlos Brown, it’s unclear if the legislative changes lawmakers have proposed could have prevented what happened on the train in Charlotte. While he had previously been hospitalized for two weeks under an involuntary commitment order, his last three encounters with law enforcement were for nonviolent offenses — specifically, misusing the 911 line.
A “first step”
During the debate on Iryna’s Law in the North Carolina Senate on Sept. 22, her state senator, Mujtaba Mohammed, recounted meeting with Zarutska’s family and said their message was clear: “They want her legacy to be a call to action,” said the Democratic senator. “They want leaders — local, state and national — to put aside political differences and put people first, to take public safety seriously, to find and close the gaps in our mental health system and to make sure that no other family endures what they now endure with the loss of their daughter, partner, sister or niece.”
Republican state leaders call Iryna’s Law the first step in doing so.
“We must take a hard stance on crime,” Tricia Cotham (R-Charlotte) said during debate on the floor of the House of Representatives on Sept. 23. “We cannot have the revolving door that these terrible criminals leave the court, don’t go to jail and keep committing crimes.”
But many Democrats pushed back on whether the proposed reforms would get at root issues in the mental health and justice systems that led to Zarutska’s death.
“Tough on crime doesn’t only mean ‘Let’s pay attention to punishment after the fact.’ It also means, ‘What can we do to prevent the crime?’ Which this bill before you completely fails to do,” said Durham Democratic Rep. Marcia Morey, a retired judge who spent 18 years on the bench.
Rep. Laura Budd (D-Matthews) said the “glaring deficiency” of the bill is the lack of funding behind it.
“If you want to diagnose and treat those who are mentally ill, you’re going to have to pay for it,” Budd said. “If you want beds in psychiatric hospitals, you’re going to have to pay for it. If you want ERs and our sheriff’s departments to have capacity and be able to treat and diagnose and do those psych evals that this bill calls for, you’re going to have to pay for it.”
Other Democratic lawmakers proposed amendments to this legislation, which all failed, that would have invested more in the mental health system.
NC Health News reporters Taylor Knopf and Michelle Crouch contributed reporting.
Tomorrow: What mental health experts and advocates say is needed to support people with complex mental illness who interact with the justice system.
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