America’s Summer of Blood: Two Murders Shake the Nation to Its Foundations:
Violent deaths — assassinations — rank among the most dramatic events in the life of any family, and of the wider community as well. When such killings occur for political, social, cultural or other reasons, they carry far-reaching consequences for entire peoples and states. History offers ample examples: the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln in 1865, John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK) in 1963, and Martin Luther King in 1968. Each of these attacks, in large part, redirected the course of American history.
The Train Killer
A Ukrainian refugee was killed on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina, by a criminal with a history of mental illness, African American DeCarlos Brown Jr. The murder happened for no apparent reason. Zarutska had taken a seat on the train in front of Brown and was typing on her phone. After a few minutes, the attacker pulled out a knife and stabbed the innocent victim in the neck several times; she bled out shortly after. For the first minute and a half, none of the other passengers intervened, even though the train was packed. Although Brown claimed after his arrest that he killed Zarutska because he believed she could read his mind, the murder carries clear racial overtones, since he reportedly said before the attack: “I got this white girl.” The crime is an unambiguous sign of the inefficiency of the American justice system and of unresolved racial tensions.
The 34-year-old Brown was far from a model citizen — in fact, he was deeply mired in a life of crime. By the time of the attack he had already been arrested as many as 14 times and had served five years in prison after being convicted of an armed robbery committed eleven years earlier. Five months after his release from prison, in early 2021, he was arrested for assaulting his own sister. Over time he developed serious mental illness and suffered from schizophrenia. Earlier in the year, he had called 911 for no reason. Brown has been charged with a federal crime and will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars.
The Broader Context Behind the Ukrainian Refugee’s Killing
Had the American justice system done its job, Brown would either be behind bars or, more likely, in a mental institution receiving treatment. Someone arrested 14 times undoubtedly has serious psychological problems. This time, as many times before, the American justice system failed. In many cases, US courts are inefficient and prone to biased rulings depending on a defendant’s socioeconomic status, reputation and background. Juries tend to be more lenient toward defendants who share their ethnic background or social status, and less sympathetic toward those who differ from them in origin or lifestyle. In some cases, juries can even be bribed. Such failures, which lead to further serious crimes, further erode public trust in the justice system and deepen social divisions.
Beyond the judicial failures, Brown’s act was clearly also driven by his racism toward white people. Although he is mentally ill, it seems highly likely that his hostility toward white people further pushed him toward this brutal crime. The attacker had no idea his victim was Ukrainian rather than American. But racial problems in America are significant. Put more precisely, racial hostility from certain members of one group toward another has not faded even though we are well into the 21st century. Racism from some African Americans toward white people remains a taboo subject, yet it very much exists.
Hatred among some African Americans toward white people is fueled above all by economic factors — namely, the fact that white people tend to live better, have better access to elite schools, universities and jobs, and live in more developed urban and suburban areas. For some African Americans, this racism is also rooted in historical associations. Many remain deeply marked by slavery, segregation and prolonged discrimination that persisted well into the 20th century. This awareness of historical injustice often turns into generalized hatred toward white people. This narrative of “evil white people” is, moreover, often informally promoted across American public life — from schools and universities to the media. It frequently implies that all white people are guilty because of certain colonial wrongs from the past.
The Rooftop Shooter
Charlie Kirk was killed for political reasons by radical left-wing activist Tyler Robinson. The murder was carried out from a rooftop on the Utah State University campus while Kirk was giving a speech on his American Comeback Tour. The killing was carried out using a German Mauser M 98 rifle. Although he had been a promising young man with a 4.0 high school GPA, and although Utah State University had offered him a four-year scholarship, Robinson dropped out of college and set off down the path of radicalization. By all appearances, he was affiliated with America’s Antifa movement, since he had inscribed its classic slogans at the crime scene. Interestingly, the Antifa messages he used had previously been popularized through video games such as Helldivers 2 and Far Cry 6, as well as through TV series and films.
It is also striking that Robinson came from a family that fervently supported Trump, yet he was clearly left-leaning, much like many young Americans whose views skew further left than those of their conservative parents. Although he was a shy gamer who never spoke publicly about politics — he had never voted and was not a registered member of any party — political radicalization drove Robinson to kill Trump’s close associate. Robinson has been arrested and faces a draconian sentence if found guilty of the murder.
The Broader Context Behind the Killing of Trump’s Associate
The killing of this right-wing influencer is a consequence of the deep political divisions within American society. For the past five decades, liberals (Democrats) and conservatives (Republicans) have been fiercely divided on all the key issues: the right to own and carry firearms, the legalization of soft drugs, abortion, immigration policy, healthcare, the tax system, climate change, education reform, LGBTQ+ rights, and the role of the United States in international relations.
The result has been an enormous rift within American society. Progressives watch and listen to liberal outlets like MSNBC, the New York Times and HuffPost, while conservatives consume outlets like Fox News, Newsmax and The Daily Wire. What’s more, in 2020 as many as 58 percent of Americans lived in “landslide” counties, where one of the two major parties — Republican or Democratic — won by a wide margin. That is a dramatic increase, given that just half a century earlier only 27 percent of Americans lived in such counties. The electorate and the political body have become segmented, increasingly living alongside the like-minded and apart from those who think differently — a trend that has driven further radicalization.
Tolerance for the other and the different — once a defining trait of American society — no longer exists. Instead of the free speech, free expression and debate that Kirk passionately championed, many liberals believe there is simply no room left for dialogue with conservatives, whom they have thoroughly demonized. Some liberals go so far as to call for the Republican Party to be banned and for conservative activists to be barred from operating. James T. Hodgkinson, who carried out the failed assassination attempt on Republican Senator Steve Scalise in 2017, was a fervent Bernie Sanders supporter and a member of the Facebook group “Abolish the Republican Party.” Charlie Kirk’s 22-year-old killer, Tyler Robinson, held similar views.
A Shaken America
An ineffective justice system, racism, and radical political divisions ultimately led to the killings of Charlie Kirk and Iryna Zarutska. Although the United States is one of the most successful nations of all time, its problems are not disappearing — if anything, they are piling up as the decades go by. One could argue that America in the 1980s and 1990s was a more stable country than it is today. The constant divide between conservatives and liberals/progressives is producing not only separate “blue” and “red” states and counties, but also violence in the streets. In recent years, violence has erupted at street protests by the Black Lives Matter movement as well as by the radical right, alongside protests both for and against Palestine.
In a way, the icing on the cake of these political and social divisions is the string of failed assassination attempts against Donald Trump, together with the successful attack on the unfortunate Kirk. Things cannot go on like this. Something in America will have to change — Republicans and Democrats will need to “cool things down,” or else the country risks sliding into a wave of unrest that could even morph into a new American Civil War 2.0. In that light, these two brutal killings from the summer of 2025 could well be the prelude to tectonic shifts of an unwelcome kind.
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