Previous NC charges and mental health record of DeCarlos Brown: What records show
READ MORE
Charlotte light rail train stabbing
A 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, Iryna Zarutska, was fatally stabbed on Aug. 22 on the light rail line in Charlotte’s South End. 34-year-old DeCarlos Brown Jr., who has a reported history of mental health issues, is charged in the killing. Zarutska’s death has received national attention, with public comments from President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Charlotte officials.
Expand All
Decarlos Brown, the man accused of killing a young Ukrainian woman in a violent Charlotte train stabbing caught on camera, has for the last 10 years been in and out of North Carolina’s courts and jails.
A month before he boarded the light rail in south Charlotte, a judge had ordered Brown to be mentally evaluated after his lawyer said he had “a long history” of mental health issues. Brown, who is homeless, was out of jail on a written promise to appear.
Here’s a breakdown of the 34-year-old’s criminal record.
Charlotte light rail killing
Brown was most recently arrested in the Aug. 22 killing of Iryna Zarutska.
Zarutska, 23, moved to Charlotte from Kiev, Ukraine, to escape the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. She finished her shift at a pizza parlor and, still in her work clothes, boarded the Lynx Blue Line, which runs through Charlotte’s busy and rapidly growing South End and Lower South End neighborhoods.
Brown sat one row behind her, video shows. The two did not interact before he stood up and stabbed her in her neck.
She bled out, and Brown exited at the next stop.
News of the slashing that shook Charlotte last month spread across the country after Charlotte Area Transit System released the footage on Friday. Some local and national media outlets shared parts of the video.
Decarlos Brown’s first arrests
According to his Facebook page, Brown was born in Charlotte and went to West Charlotte High School. He then studied at Earle C. Clements Job Corps Academy in Kentucky from 2008 to 2010 and most recently worked at Campbell’s warehouse in Charlotte, according to Facebook.
Brown’s criminal record starts in 2011, but most of those early charges — including speeding, communicating threats, and injury to property — were dismissed by the former and current Mecklenburg district attorneys Andrew Murray and Spencer Merriweather, respectively.
In April 2014, Brown pleaded guilty to two 2013 charges of felony larceny and breaking and entering. Online court records are barren of details on these cases. A judge (online court records don’t specify who) suspended his sentence of five to 15 months in prison. Instead, the judge ordered he serve two years probation.
Prison time before stabbing
Four months into his probation, Brown robbed a man in an apartment complex in south Charlotte.
According to court documents, Brown paced the complex for an hour before approaching a man and brandishing a handgun on Aug. 21, 2014.
He “demanded the victim’s phone and money” and left in a 2001 Dodge Caravan with the man’s Samsung Galaxy Note, $450 and a $100 Lempira Honduras currency note.
The man called police to the apartment at the intersection of East Arrowwood Road and South Boulevard. Police found Brown’s car at an apartment owned by his mother.
He “was cooperative with officers at first and allowed officers to go inside,” according to court documents. Then, as officers found the stolen items, he “grew irate and asked [officers] to leave.”
Officers arrested him that same day.
Brown pleaded guilty to robbery with a dangerous weapon in February 2015 and was sentenced to a minimum of six years and one month and a maximum of eight years and four months in prison.
He served five years and seven months before being released from Central Prison in September 2020. Then he spent one year on parole.
Decarlos Brown criminal history
Almost exactly a year later, in September 2022, he was again arrested on charges of assault on a female and injury to property, according to jail records. Mecklenburg County online records on the state’s eCourts system do not show any corresponding case files related to this arrest.
A year and a half later, in April 2024, Brown was arrested for misusing 911, according to jail records. He posted a $500 secured bond and was charged with the same offense two weeks later, in early May 2024. And again in January.
The April and May arrests do not have any corresponding court files, but the January arrest does.
Magistrate Judge Teresa Stokes released Brown on Jan. 19, the same day he was arrested, on a written promise to appear. On Jan. 21, Judge Fritz Mercer Jr., assigned him a public defender.
More than six months later, Chief District Judge Roy Wiggins on July 28 ordered his capacity to proceed be evaluated, as his public defender had requested.
Less than a month later, Brown boarded the light rail, and Zarutska died.
Brown was supposed to “present himself” to Alliance Health, which is contracted with the jail, to be evaluated within seven days of Wiggins’ order. If that order was followed, he would have been evaluated weeks before the stabbing.
The public defender representing Brown in his murder charge on Aug. 28 filed a motion questioning Brown’s mental capacity, and Wiggins again ordered he be evaluated at Central Regional Hospital in Butner.
Brown is now being held at the Mecklenburg County Detention Center with no bond. Police have not identified any motive or linked the attack to mental illness.
This story was originally published September 8, 2025 at 6:08 PM with the headline "Previous NC charges and mental health record of DeCarlos Brown: What records show."
.png)
