Mother of man charged in light rail killing prays victim’s family forgives him

When DeCarlos Brown Jr. recently got out of the hospital and was moved to the Mecklenburg County jail, his mother got to speak to him over the phone.

“I’m all right, Mama. I’m good,” Michelle Dewitt remembered her son saying shortly after police charged him in the Aug. 22 killing of a woman on the Charlotte light rail train.

Brown told her that the police said they had the wrong man, and that they were going to let him go, said Dewitt, of Charlotte.

For real?

“I got to go back over to the hospital, though, ‘cause they got to get that object out of my head,” she remembered him saying.

For some time, he has claimed he is controlled by that “object,” Dewitt said in an interview Wednesday. It all started when he got out of prison for armed robbery in 2020, she said. His family noticed a change. He was “standoffish” and talked to himself every so often, she remembered.

Now, the 34-year-old faces a murder charge in state court and another criminal charge in federal court. He is being held in the Mecklenburg County jail and is represented by the public defender’s office.

Video released by Charlotte’s transit system last week showed Brown stabbing 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee, as she rode home from work.

Mother: Brown has schizophrenia

President Donald Trump has called Brown a “monster.”

In Charlotte and across the country, a larger conversation about the criminal justice and mental health systems is underway.

Dewitt agrees with many: The system failed.

Brown is diagnosed with schizophrenia, his mother said. She and her husband “begged” Atrium Health to take him in long-term because he kept banging on the sink and walls in their home, among other things.

But unless he said he would kill himself or someone else, they could not take him in, she recalled.

“He only stayed for, like, a few days,” she said. “I had to go to the magistrate’s office and get an involuntary committal.”

Atrium’s mental health center on Billingsley Road kept him for two weeks, and he got medicine that helped him, his mother said. But he stopped taking it.

“He says somebody’s in control. It’s a chip in him. We don’t understand, we don’t get it — people controlling his thoughts, people controlling how he acts,” she said.

Law enforcement has encountered that, too.

In a January court affidavit, police said that Brown misused 911 and claimed that a “man-made” material controlled when he ate, walked and talked, among other things. He wanted Charlotte-Mecklenburg police to investigate. They told him it was a “medical issue” and that they couldn’t help.

Before his time in prison and before he started talking about being controlled, he was a West Mecklenburg High School graduate, his mother said. He worked at Subway for a time.

“He actually went to my husband, who was able to talk him into going to trade school to get his degree in engineering,” she said.

His mother said he was a “decent young man” who said “yes ma’am” and “no ma’am,” and offered to carry heavy things for her. He got “in the streets” and landed in trouble. She told him he would learn his lesson the hard way — in prison.

Prays her son will be forgiven by victim’s family

On Tuesday, the regional FBI head and United States attorney in charge of Charlotte held back tears as they described their conversation with the Zarutska family.

She had just moved in with her boyfriend, the men said, and was beginning to build her life as an adult. She worked at a pizza place, took care of animals in her neighborhood and loved being in the United States, they said.

“This is obviously a horrible, horrible situation,” U.S. Attorney Russ Ferguson said.

Dewitt, too, is horrified. She hopes she will wake up from the nightmare soon, she said.

Zarutska deserved to live, she said, noting the cruel irony that she “came from a place of destruction and still ended in destruction.” She has never lost a child, and she cannot say that she understands what the family is going through, she said.

“I hope and pray that one day they find it in their heart to forgive my son, and that they realize that I am praying for their family,” said Dewitt, who works in the community with people who have experienced sexual abuse and trauma.

For now, she is going to encourage her son to do as his lawyer says, she said. Knowing her son is now part of a national conversation has been hard.

Told that Trump has called for Brown to receive the death penalty, Dewitt said the president may not see the whole picture.

“There’s a whole lot of parents that are in my situation… He needs to maybe step down from the White House and go visit the mental health facility without cameras and no one around,” she said.

Ryan Oehrli covers criminal justice in the Charlotte region for The Charlotte Observer. His work is produced with financial support from the nonprofit The Just Trust. The Observer maintains full editorial control of its journalism.

This story was originally published September 11, 2025 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Mother of man charged in light rail killing prays victim’s family forgives him."

Ryan Oehrli

The Charlotte Observer

Ryan Oehrli writes about criminal justice for The Charlotte Observer. His reporting has delved into police misconduct, jail and prison deaths, the state’s pardon system and more. He was also part of a team of Pulitzer finalists who covered Hurricane Helene. A North Carolina native, he grew up in Beaufort County.