Have we lost our humanity?
The grim footage of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska being brutally murdered on a North Carolina commuter train August 22 was absolutely horrific.
And it only got more heartbreaking once when additional video emerged Tuesday.
What we saw was indifference from fellow passengers as Zarutska — randomly attacked by a mentally deranged career criminal — lay dying.
No one got off their asses to help the 23-year-old, not even once the perp, Decarlos Brown, had taken his pocket knife and left the train.
After Zarutska was viciously knifed in the throat by the psychotic ex-con, she looked around — incredulous and completely confused.
Her face, frozen with abject terror, should haunt us forever.
There she is, scrunched up in a defensive position with her knees tucked to her chest. As her head cocks back and her eyes glance up to see the monster behind her, she looks like a frightened toddler.
The last thing she likely saw was Brown’s menacing shadow and, maybe, the indifferent stares of her fellow riders.
This was the America she reportedly loved — a place that offered safe harbor from her war-torn homeland. A place that ultimately failed her, not once but twice.
Within 21 seconds of the stabbing, Zarutska becomes almost lifeless in the video, slipping off her seat and crumpling to the floor like a human accordion. About ten seconds later, blood starts to pour from under her seat onto the step below.
You see some people milling around the gruesome scene. It’s difficult to know what they were saying or thinking, but it wasn’t until a full minute and 36 seconds later that a man finally comes to her aid.
He appears to phone for help while pulling her compressed body into the aisle. A few minutes later, two other people look to be administering CPR.
Watching the video, I thought of the shooting at Annunciation, the Catholic school in Minneapolis where a little girl was shot in the head less than a week after Zarutska’s murder. Pat Scallen, who lived nearby, rushed to the scene and later recalled finding the young girl, who asked him for a simple but meaningful act.
“Please just hold my hand,” the victim pleaded.
Scallen did as he was asked because, he said, everyone was frightened. “They wanted their mom and dad.”
And isn’t that what we all deserve in times of fear, panic, uncertainty or pain? We want someone to squeeze our hand and assure us that we’re not alone. We want comfort.
From the looks of things, no one held Zarutska’s hand as she died. All she felt was the filthy floor and the partition of a soulless municipal light rail.
It’s like she was stabbed to death by the madman and then metaphorically walked over by her fellow passengers.
Some on social media have blamed the so-called Daniel Penny effect: people declining to help others because they don’t want to end up with their own personal ordeals, whether it’s prosecution or public scorn.
I think that’s far too neat and simple of an explanation.
The way Zarutska was ignored for by the people right around her underscores the bravery and decency of Penny, who jumped into action — preventing a madman who promised to kill, from harming innocent straphangers on a Manhattan F train.
In general, we’ve allowed ourselves to become so calloused we shrug off others’ suffering. There’s far too many people subscribing to the church of “None of my business.”
We’ve become uncaring zombies.
On public transportation and on the street, too many people are far too interested in the world inside our phones rather than the symphony around us.
City dwellers assume a certain a mount of risk, considering the amount of people we interact with daily. But, for most of my life, there’s always been a comfort in crowds.
More and more, though, the crowds are falling short.
Even much of the media coverage of Zarutska’s murder was just as passive as the people on her train.
Axios reported not on the murder but on the MAGA influencers’ reactions to it. The New York Times did the same, writing, “A Gruesome Murder in North Carolina Ignites a Firestorm on the Right.”
And a CNN headline treated it like some meet-cute: “How the lives of a Ukrainian refugee and a Charlotte man with a criminal history converged in a fatal stabbing.”
Zarutska’s murder itself was totally avoidable — a result of bad progressive policies that prioritize mentally ill criminals over law-abiding citizens. A failure of the system meant to protect us.
The aftermath, though, was a second dagger: A failure of humanity.
Credit to Nypost AND Peoples