The Spire

Sean Rego ’26

Chief Opinions Editor

On Aug. 22 of this year, 23 year old Iryna Zarutska–  a Ukrainian refugee who had fled the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2022– was traveling by train in North Carolina when she was savagely attacked and stabbed to death by a fellow passenger. The video, taken from the Charlotte Transit System, is gruesome and cruel; it shows the horrible murder of a woman nearly my age, who, after the initial blows, is in a state of shock before she topples over, bleeds out and succumbs to her wounds. And yet somehow, the worst part of the video is not the stabbing, but in fact the sheer neglect that Iryna Zarustka faces in her last moments; she dies alone and unhelped, despite the several people who very clearly see her dying. That’s horrific and telling of our current society. 

Growing up, weren’t we raised not to be bystanders? Weren’t we raised to stand up for others and to stop trouble when we see it? I know for a fact that we all claim that– in the right situation– we would act justly and virtuously to help our fellow citizens and humans, but is that always the case? If we look at this tragic death, then the answer is no. Sure, it is anecdotal, but it is also emblematic of the thousands of murders across the United States that take place in our cities and streets. Just to think about any case similar to that of Iryna Zarutska– a woman who simply was going home to her family– is sickening. I think of my parents, who also came to this great country in search of a better life, and I think of my relatives who’ve come from Ukraine in recent times; would they be helped if they were mercilessly attacked on a train?

I know that this story is not exactly the most interesting for some of us or breaking as of writing, but still, it hurts to think that Americans have fallen in their standards of being good (or even decent) samaritans. For it to take more than one minute and thirty seconds to help a woman whose throat had been slit wide open is not normal and not of our values. It speaks of our collective decline in camaraderie and humanity. It speaks to our desensitization even more so; all the violence and death we see in the world has not made us more compassionate evidently, just more opinionated. 

I think as Americans we need to stop asking ourselves hypotheticals of: “what would you do in power to stop injustice?” or “what would you do if we lived in a time of greater injustices?”, not because they are irrelevant questions or concerns– after all, millions suffer each day and dozens of humanitarian crises go unnoticed by everyone (unless it’s politically convenient to mention)– but because it distracts from what we can do to stop injustice right now. If you had been the person sitting next to Iryna Zarutska on that light rail train, would you have helped her? Would you have called 911 or yelled for a doctor or simply just comforted the young woman in her last moments? Perhaps those are the queries we all need to consider, because as her death shows, they aren’t so hypothetical. 

In a better world, not only could this poor Ukrainian refugee who had just begun a new life in our great country have been alive, but her last moments wouldn’t have been so terribly disgusting. It would be easy for us to just say that this country needs more rule of law; that is true, but it doesn’t get to the core of my horror with this case. What I failed to see in the death of Iryna Zarutska, and in so many cases of similar needless deaths in our cities and streets, is the common virtue and decency of men and women. What we need as a society is to remind ourselves of our duties to our fellow humans in times of need. We need to not simply pretend to care about others and to say that we are righteous, but rather to act when necessary to defend those right in front of us, and we need to once more sensitize ourselves to our own communities. Doing that is one big step in ridding the rot of indecency, the bliss of neglect and superficiality of politicized social justice that has destroyed our kinship as Americans. 

Copy Edited by Charlotte Collins ’26

Feature image courtesy of AP News