CMPD bodycam shows man begged for help months before Charlotte light rail attack
Eight months before a mentally ill man was arrested in the Charlotte light rail stabbing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska, a Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department officer spent 20 minutes outside a hospital talking to him and trying to usher him toward taking medicine, new police body-worn camera video shows.
Then, a sergeant in charge of that officer arrived and in less than four minutes shut down the conversation and announced the man — DeCarlos Brown Jr. — would be arrested if he called for help with this “nonsense” again.
The nonsense was a mental health crisis, video released Tuesday shows.
Brown, now 35, was arrested on Jan. 19 for misusing 911, a misdemeanor charge meant for prank callers. He pleaded with police to help him investigate the “man-made” material he believed was controlling him. At the time, he was homeless and had three felony convictions, having served five years in prison for robbery, breaking and entering and larceny.
A magistrate judge released Brown the day of his January arrest on a written promise to appear.
Eight months later, surveillance video from the Charlotte Area Transit System showed Brown stabbing 23-year-old Zarutska after she sat in front of him on the city’s LYNX Blue Line train in South End on Aug. 22.
When that CATS video published online, the magistrate came under fire for not holding Brown in jail in January.
President Donald Trump said “a Democrat judge” left Brown “free to slaughter an innocent woman,” and North Carolina Republican Congressman Tim Moore said the magistrate “had the chance to protect the public and chose not to” and was “unfit to hold this consequential position.” In response, state lawmakers passed a crime bill that takes effect Monday and will hold more people in jail before trial.
The Charlotte Observer previously reported that the magistrate, Teresa Stokes, was following bipartisan guidelines on release. Now, body-worn camera videos of the January arrest show how Brown landed in front of her. Charlotte police took him to the jail to be booked for a crime rather than connect him with mental health services.
A judge ordered CMPD to release the videos after a Charlotte Observer reporter filed a petition in court.
‘You taking medicine?’
In a recorded jail call, Brown told his sister “material in his body” was controlling him at the time of the stabbing.
He said the same thing when he called 911 before 9:40 p.m. on Jan. 19.
He took himself to Novant Health Presbyterian Medical Center for help with the material. Police videos show he told officers he had, for three years, tried to get help from both police and doctors. Police always told Brown they couldn’t investigate without evidence, he told the officers outside the hospital.
Doctors couldn’t give him the evidence he was looking for; all they could give him was a schizophrenia diagnosis, Brown said.
CMPD said in a statement Tuesday that its Community Policing Crisis Response Team responded to some of Brown’s 2024 calls about material in his body. Brown declined assistance during those encounters, the press release said.
Records show that in March 2024, he told dispatchers he was “human trafficked” and believed “someone did something to [his] body.” About a month later, he twice called complaining about something controlling him while outside the same Novant hospital he would later return to. In May 2024, dispatchers connected Brown to a crisis line.
He didn’t call back until October 2024. Then, nearly a year before Zarutska’s death, he “started rambling about a murder case,” according to police records.
In January, one CMPD officer spoke calmly with Brown and politely tried to explain that officers couldn’t investigate something in his head or body.
He told Brown they’d talked before, saying “You think you’ve got somebody inside controlling you, right? Somebody gave you some man-made material and it’s controlling what you do ...”
Brown nodded his head. Brown said he tried to talk to the FBI about the situation, too, and told agents he was “getting trafficked.” Brown said the FBI told him: “It sounds like you need to take your medicine,” according to the videos.
“You taking medicine for it, or anything like that?” the officer asked at 9:57 p.m.
“Man, no,” Brown responded. He at one point said he was “mentally perfect” and that his “body got exposed to something.”
The officer asked if Brown was opposed to medication. He was.
“I think maybe if you took it,” the officer said, “it could get rid of some of the stuff.”
While talking to this unnamed officer, Brown several times asked for a sergeant.
A sergeant who identified himself as Hawkins arrived at 10 p.m. — just after the unnamed officer broached the topic of medicine.
In less than four minutes, the sergeant ended the interaction. He told Brown he should go into the hospital. Brown already had, he replied. Now he wanted police to investigate. And if police couldn’t do that, he wanted help following up with the FBI.
When the sergeant learned that Brown had already talked to CMPD officers on a previous date, he said he couldn’t do anything. He didn’t want to “step on anybody’s toes.”
When Brown got frustrated and started yelling, pleading for the sergeant to read the sheet of paper where he explained everything, the sergeant responded: “If you’re gonna shout at me, I’m gonna walk away. I came here as a favor.”
“All right ... thank you, bye,” Brown said.
“Take care of yourself, sir,” the sergeant said as he ushered his officers away. He told the officers: “If he calls us from 911 again for some of this nonsense we’ll lock him up for misuse of 911.”
Brown immediately dialed 911 to try to talk to a new batch of police, according to police records. Police arrested him.
Light rail stabbing suspect arrested at hospital
Brown asked why he was being handcuffed.
The sergeant said he told Brown he would be arrested and charged if he called 911 for “nonsense” again. But the video showed the sergeant had not warned Brown of that; he only told fellow officers.
Brown continued to insist he did have an emergency.
“Once you find out that this s--- real, your job gone,” he said, according to bodycam video. “How many times did I tell y’all to stop locking me up?”
If removing materials wasn’t a “cop’s job,” he asked where he should get help. He said he three times had been arrested for calling police for help.
“You’d think you’d learn,” the sergeant said.
“It’s the same emergency, though,” Brown said.
Officers make joke about suicide
An officer who remained mostly quiet throughout the interaction with Brown put him in the back of a squad car, and the sergeant pointed out that a dime fell out of Brown’s pocket.
“He may need those 10 cents,” the sergeant quipped.
As the sergeant and two officers walked away, the sergeant said: “Fantastic. Problem solved. Make sure he doesn’t hang himself back there, please.”
Officers laughed before the sergeant turned his body camera off. CMPD’s Tuesday statement said officers decided they would not file for involuntary commitment paperwork — which permits police to take a person to a treatment facility without their consent — because Brown did not “express intent to harm himself or others.”
Later, inside the police car, video shows Brown was reunited with the officer who first spoke to him politely at length. The officer said he was trying to finish the paperwork and get Brown to the jail so he could “take them cuffs off you as quickly as possible.”
“If that thing is real, I hope we can figure out what it is one day, man,” the officer said.
Brown sincerely thanked him before asking: “Do I gotta stay in jail for the rest of my life?”
“I don’t want you to stay in jail the rest of your life,” the unnamed officer said.
Brown came before a magistrate at about 11 p.m., according to jail records, and she released him by 11:30 p.m.
Brown returned to court for three procedural hearings before the August stabbing. His misusing 911 charge is still pending, and he also faces a state murder charge and a federal charge of violence against a railroad carrier and mass transportation system resulting in death.
Both of those charges could result in life in prison or the death penalty.
All of Brown’s cases are paused until a forensic psychologist determines whether he has the mental capacity to proceed.
How the Observer got the videos
In North Carolina, only a judge can authorize release of law-enforcement videos.
In requesting footage of officers’ response to Brown’s January 911 call, an Observer reporter in a September court petition wrote: “There is obvious public interest in these materials, as they document the last known time that Brown came into contact with police before he boarded the light rail” and was arrested in Zarutska’s death.
Her death “spurred serious national and local conversations about mental illness, the justice system, and even public transportation safety,” the newspaper’s lawyers — Benjamin Leighton of Alexander Ricks PLLC and Elizabeth Soja of Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press — wrote in a court filing.
The Observer reporter said “release of these materials is necessary for transparency and for the public to have trust in how police interacted with Brown as he showed signs of mental crisis.”
Mecklenburg County Superior Court Judge Tim Rooks agreed and on Nov. 19 ordered the police department to release the footage.
Observer staff writer Jeff A. Chamer contributed to this report.
This story was originally published November 25, 2025 at 11:29 AM with the headline "CMPD bodycam shows man begged for help months before Charlotte light rail attack."
