President Trump on Wednesday said the suspect in the killing of a Ukrainian woman on a transit train in Charlotte, N.C., should get a quick trial and then be executed, a day after the Justice Department announced it would bring federal charges in the case.
“The ANIMAL who so violently killed the beautiful young lady from Ukraine, who came to America searching for peace and safety, should be given a “Quick” (there is no doubt!) Trial, and only awarded THE DEATH PENALTY. There can be no other option!!!” Trump said on Wednesday morning on Truth Social.
The suspect in the Charlotte attack is 34-year-old Decarlos Brown, who has been charged with first-degree murder in North Carolina. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Western District of North Carolina also charged him on Tuesday of committing an act causing death on a mass transportation system. If convicted, he could face the death penalty.
Trump restored the use of the federal death penalty through an executive order on his first day in office in January, rescinding a Biden-era order that issued a moratorium on federal executions. In the last six months of Trump’s first term, 13 people were executed on death row.
Brown is alleged to have attacked Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte light rail train on the night of Aug. 22. Zarutska fled Ukraine with her family in 2022 amid Russia’s ongoing war with the country.
Video of the shocking crime shows the Zarutska getting on the train and sitting in the row ahead of the suspect. The video then shows the suspect unfolding a knife and standing before attacking the unsuspecting Zarutska.
Trump on Monday condemned the deadly stabbing, after the gruesome video of the attack was released over the weekend.
He called Brown “a mad man” and “a lunatic,” adding that Zarutska was “just viciously stabbed, she’s just sitting there. So, they’re evil people. We have to be able to handle that, if we don’t handle that we don’t have a country.”
The violent crime has also turned the focus on crime on public transportation, an issue that has been a previous focus on New York City’s subway lines, among other places.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Monday that the killing illustrates the “epidemic of violence and homelessness” on the nation’s public transit systems.
“The problem is a lot of people, unlike the rich liberals, they can’t ride Uber, they don’t have a vehicle, they have to take public transportation, and public transportation has become an epidemic of violence and homelessness across the country,” Duffy told Fox News’s Sean Hannity in an interview on Monday night.