The brutal murder of Iryna Zarutska began a national conversation on mental illness — a problem every one of us, in every city in this country, is intimately acquainted with because tens of thousands of violent lunatics roam our streets today more or less unchecked. There is no cure for most of what we see out there, there is no longer any easy path to conservatorship, and the problem is now sufficiently bad there is no tolerating the status quo. It’s time to bring back asylums.

Obviously, the subject is fraught. Civil libertarians believe the chaos on our streets is just the cost of freedom, while many well-meaning liberals believe the problem just a matter of our government refusing to fund treatments for mental illness that literally do not exist. The big missing piece of the conversation is, I think, a history. How did we get here? What has been tried? What is the reality on the ground? And how do we move forward.

Today, G. B. Rango lays out the definitive piece on the problem of our violent lunatics, and the way forward.

—Solana

Iryna Zarutska was stabbed three times on August 22nd of 2025 while sitting quietly on Charlotte’s LYNX Blue Line, an integral part of the state’s light-rail commuter system. Decarlos Dejuan Brown Jr., unprovoked, plunged a folding knife into her throat. He did this two more times in rapid succession. Zarutska looked up at him in terror, visibly petrified and confused, blood spilling out of her neck. She then covered her face with her hands, remaining conscious for nearly a minute before sliding off of her chair and onto the floor of the train. Brown wrapped his hand in a sweater and walked away. Iryna was pronounced dead at the scene. All of this was captured on security cameras.

A particular still from this footage has become central in the story’s coverage. It shows Zarutska looking down at her phone and making herself very small in her chair. Her arms are pulled close across her body, her knees are touching. She is in the sort of physical position that one now tends to assume when in unavoidable public proximity with a person whom one senses to be mentally unstable. Whose attention is easily drawn, and whose unpredictable set of potential reactions ranges from silent shuffling to incoherent and aggressive yelling to spontaneous, life-threatening violence. Brown is looming behind her in this image, arm raised, knife in hand, midway through the swing of his first stabbing motion.

Brown walked off the scene unimpeded, a dotted trail of blood following behind him, through two train cars filled with bystanders. No one came to Zarutska’s aid until one minute and thirty-six seconds after the attack. Some have attributed these facts to a growing collective callousness toward the suffering of others. I believe, however, that they originate not from a place of indifference, but of practiced inattention, one that is a logical consequence of public policy. These bystanders were instinctually aware of Brown’s mental instability, accustomed to dealing with the presence of such people, and engaging in the rational set of avoidant behaviors. The purposeful staring at nothing, metaphorical blinders on, body language signaling non-confrontational dispositions. Iryna was making herself very small in her chair.

It is now routine in American cities to come into contact with folks who are some combination of severely mentally ill, homeless, perennially criminal, and substance-abusing. Most of these people are not dangerous. Some of them are. The almost limitless tolerance of their disruptive presence in common society is a choice that we have made, one that hides behind the nebulous defense of “empathy as policy”¹ while fomenting destructive conditions. We have largely failed to engage with this problem for several decades.

Brown’s case highlights this negligence in striking fashion. He had been arrested fourteen times for a litany of violent and nonviolent offenses before murdering Zarutska. This is one of the most-reported-on facts of the story, a source of understandable outrage, and a primary representation of the failure of “empathy as policy” in the criminal justice system — a pattern of imaginary thinking in which endless second chances and empty hand-waving about transformative reformation dominate. Anyone with Brown’s sort of track record should, quite obviously, be removed from society for the preemptive good of all parties involved. This requires long-term incarceration or institutionalization, neither of which were demanded of or granted to Decarlos Brown. (With the caveat that he previously served a six-year prison sentence for armed robbery from 2015 to 2020, which is in many senses “long-term,” though clearly neither sufficiently long nor reformative.)

I use the term “granted” here, in reference to long-term institutionalization, because of a number of lesser-known facts about Decarlos Brown. Michelle Dewitt, his mother, with whom he had been living after his 2020 prison release, had attempted multiple times to get her son committed to a mental institution. He is a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, was growing increasingly aggressive at home, and would pace the room while having heated conversations with invisible participants. Dewitt took her son to a mental hospital, but they did not have space for Brown, who was, in any case, refusing voluntary commitment. The hospital informed Dewitt that if he was not “trying to kill himself or someone else,” she would need a court order to have him committed.

Dewitt then went through the legal process of petitioning the court, demonstrating successfully that her son met the criteria for involuntary commitment. The civil order was granted, and Brown was remanded to a mental health facility for the stunningly meager duration of 14 days. He stopped taking his medication soon after returning to his mother’s house. Dewitt and her husband eventually dropped him off at the Roof Above Lucille Giles Men’s Shelter, no longer able to abide him in their home, and Decarlos began living on the streets. In January of 2025, he went to Novant Hospital, seeking help and claiming that he was afflicted with some “man-made material that controlled when he ate, walked, and talked.” The hospital was unable to accommodate him, and the police became involved. Officers told Brown that there was nothing they could do, which greatly upset Brown, who proceeded to call 911 to request further assistance. He was arrested for “misuse of the 911 system” before being released without bond back into the general public.

After killing Zarutska, Brown called his sister from jail. “The material did it… whoever was working the materials, they lashed out on her,” he said. “They just lashed out on her, that’s what happened.” He then added, “I never said not one word to the lady at all. That’s scary, ain’t it. Why would somebody stab somebody for no reason?”

Brown’s murder of Zarutska is, of course, not the only such case of severely mentally ill wanderers unleashing unprovoked violence on unsuspecting members of the general public. On October 4th, 2021, Anthonia Egegbara — a 29-year-old homeless and schizophrenic woman whose family had tried repeatedly to get her professional help — pushed Lenny Javier into an oncoming Times Square subway train. On January 15th, 2022, at 9:30 in the morning, Michelle Go was pushed in front of an oncoming R train at a New York City subway stop by Martial Simon, a 61-year-old homeless man and diagnosed schizophrenic who had been in and out of various institutions for 20 years (and who, notably, told a psychiatrist in 2017 that it was “only a matter of time” before he shoved a woman onto the tracks).

May 21st, 2023, at the Lexington Avenue and 63rd Street stop, Kamal Semrade grabbed the head of Emine Ozsoy with two hands and, according to a witness account, “mushed her head — not her body — into the train. She just tumbled, just kept spinning because the train kept hitting her. You could see the white inside [the flesh in her face], that’s how bad it was.” March 25th, 2024, Carlton McPherson snuck up behind Jason Volz and pushed him onto the subway tracks at 125th Street and Lexington Avenue. McPherson had been hospitalized several times in two years before this incident, for artifacts of severe mental illness, and his brother Daquan insisted their family had “repeatedly tried to ensure he remained in psychiatric care.” Daquan “begged them to keep him, but they said he wasn’t a threat to himself or others… and they let him go.” McPherson was released two weeks before killing Jason Volz.

This cohort of examples consists only of New York City subway-pushings that occurred in the last five years, were perpetrated by homeless people with evidence of severe mental illness, and were entirely unprovoked. Even within this limited scope, I am unable to cover the list comprehensively for fear of turning this piece into a morose droning-on — at least 25 people were pushed onto NYC subway tracks in 2024 alone. (Obviously, many of these do not fit the precise shape pertinent to this discussion, but the point has been made.)

This is also just one city’s subset of extreme examples: any person who has spent meaningful time in a major American metropolis has had, at minimum, one nontrivially unnerving encounter with someone who is aggressively mentally unstable. The consequences of tolerating free-range lunatics, a colorful phrase which I invoke here with no pejorative ill-will, reach far beyond the hyper-acute hazard of being literally murdered. Why do we accept the ubiquity of this on-edge, unsafe feeling, the ceding of the character of public spaces to a small minority of profoundly suffering individuals who lack the wherewithal to operate safely in society?

This incredible systemic failure is institutional and cultural: the mid-20th-century demolition of American insane asylums, whose initial construction and eventual destruction were both functions of ill-fated empathy, left us without a viable option for the preemptive and humane isolation of these disturbed individuals. We then filled this institutional void with coping mechanisms, namely a persistent delusion that our secular powers of criminal and psychiatric reform were limitless, sparing ourselves the difficult work of dealing with reality (at the expense of allowing the festering of this proverbial rat’s nest). Endless strings of repetitive catch-and-release prison stints. Short-term, and therefore futile, psychiatric confinements, limited by infrastructural capacity. Permanent, rampant, inhumane homelessness.

It is not that we are refusing to cure the severely mentally ill out of disdain, or apathy, but that we lack the medical ability to do so. Anti-psychotic pills, even if taken religiously, which they rarely are, fall far short of being reason-restoring. They also come with a laundry list of brutal, and common, side effects: painful muscle contractions, severe weight gain, new-onset diabetes, nausea, insomnia, chronic involuntary movements. A refusal to grant these individuals long-term institutionalization, therefore, amounts to nothing less than a surrendering of the public to insanity.

In 2023, as part of his larger Agenda 47, Trump vowed to “open large parcels of inexpensive land, bring in doctors, psychiatrists, social workers, and drug rehab specialists, and create tent cities where the homeless can be relocated and their problems identified.” For those deemed “severely mentally ill and deeply disturbed,” he planned to “bring them back to mental institutions, where they belong, with the goal of reintegrating them back into society once they are well enough to manage.”

Then, in July of 2025, Trump signed an executive order entitled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets” that, among other things, directed the Attorney General to expand the use of involuntary non-criminal commitment for those who are homeless and suffering from severe mental illness — to make it legally easier to preemptively isolate them.

Most recently, when asked in a September 2025 interview if he would be amenable to the idea of “the government reopening insane asylums for people with serious mental illness,” Trump replied, “Yeah, I would… they used to have them, and you never saw people like we had… they released them all into society because they couldn’t afford it… you can’t have these people walking around.”

Slippery-slope-fearers are naturally, and perhaps fairly, wary of this proposed pro-reinstitutionalization trajectory. There are obvious due process and civil rights concerns associated with the forcible removal of people from society based not on criminal convictions, but on potentially subjective evaluations of their mental states. This is a heated conversation even in the case of modern conservatorships established and led by family members, à la the Britney Spears situation, let alone hypothetical widespread, state-initiated asylum lockups. A preemptive assumption that this person will harm themselves or others has to be made with enough certainty to strip them of their autonomy. The hairiness of this territory, however, rather than discouraging us from searching for potential solutions, should be seen as a call to continue (and retrospectively learn from) a conversation that has been happening in America since our prenatal days.

Francis Fauquier, the Lieutenant Governor of Virginia from 1758 until his death in 1768, wrote the following a decade before the Declaration of Independence was signed: “It is expedient that I should also recommend to your Consideration and Humanity a poor unhappy Set of People who are deprived of their Senses, and wander about the Country, terrifying the Rest of their Fellow Creatures. A legal Confinement, and proper Provision, ought to be appointed for these miserable Objects… to endeavour to restore to them their lost Reason.” A year later, he expressed concern that, given the lack of progress on resolving this issue, he was “compelled to the daily commission of an illegal act, by confining, without any authority, a poor lunatick who, if set at liberty, would be mischievous to society.” Nine years later, America was born, the “unalienable rights” phrase was printed, and the unsolved problem of these wanderers remained.

In the late 1700s and early 1800s, confinement of the severely mentally ill was widespread and unofficial, driven by social and carceral forces. Families would hide their mentally ill relatives away out of shame, and those without accommodating families would be subject to imprisonment in local jails (crimeless or otherwise, as Fauquier noted). Still others were relegated to workhouses and almshouses, many of which had designated sections for insane occupants.