Unorthodox Angles/Andrew Gramling
More Than Meets the Eye
By now, many or most people have heard of and have had time to process the fatal stabbing of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee, aboard a light rail in Charlotte, North Carolina on August 22nd of this year. This incident has sparked a firestorm of outrage and political tensions across social media and elsewhere, even causing President Trump to step in and propose a death sentence for the suspect, Decarlos Brown Jr. On the surface, this appeared to be an unprovoked, unjustified murder of a young woman seeking refuge from the consequences of war by a repeat offender who shouldn’t have been released so many times because he was a danger to the public.
But what happens when a deeper and closer analysis of the situation occurs? Does that exact same narrative still hold up?
From the online chatter I’ve observed, most people reacted to the stabbing incident emotionally rather than with reason, calling Decarlos an animal and any racial slur imaginable while demanding public executions be brought back, while also citing a coming race war, which has been done off and on for at least a decade, but especially during heated times like these.
I attribute my lack of an emotional response not to apathy, but to the emotional work I’ve been doing in recent years that makes it harder for me to react with uncontrolled emotion, but instead, I look at things with clarity and my instincts pick up on red flags whenever they become obvious in a situation.
Being someone who rarely ever accepts anything at face-value, and after watching the video of the incident several times, I automatically began to shift into “Detective Mode” without even trying. I started to notice patterns and inconsistencies that led me to question what really happened that evening in Charlotte.
What I noticed first was that the only blood that appeared initially after the stabbing was the blood dripping from the knife used to stab Iryna. Despite reports claiming that she was stabbed in the neck, I was surprised to see no visible neck wound nor blood spraying or gushing from that area, which is said to sometimes spray in sync with the heartbeat. If the stab occurred below the visible portion of the neck underneath the shirt, there were still no visible cuts in her shirt to match a deep penetration by a knife, which are said to usually have a v-shape to them.
What else struck me as odd was that while in a life-threatening and what turned out to be a life-ending situation, Iryna managed to hold onto her cellphone without releasing it. During a situation where an individual experiences extreme shock or surprise, there is a tendency to let go of whatever is being held. Iryna also remained relatively stationary for being in an adrenaline-induced state No shakes, no rapid eye or head movement, and not even any signs of heavy or panicked breathing or panicked emotional responses.
In the uncut video, Iryna’s hands can be seen covering the area where the clavicals connect to the sternum while the incident was taking place, which is in very close proximity to where the stabs occurred, yet there was no visible evidence of any defensive wounds on the hands or arms; another thing that often occurs during knife attacks.
Iryna’s reaction to having been stabbed repeatedly was to cover her mouth rather than the wound(s), which is unusual because there is often an instinctive tendency to do so. She briefly looked down after Decarlos finished his attack, indicating that even if she was in a state of shock, she was still aware of what happened to her.
The uniform response of all the other passengers also stood out as unusual to me. The entire scene seemed to lack the chaos and impromptu nature of most violent attacks. It was also surprising that there wasn’t a flood of eyewitness reports coming in since there were clearly many other passengers on the train who had seen Decarlos that night. Inconsistencies like these, while not enough on their own to prove anything, certainly make me question what I see.
One possible next question would be: Why would someone stage an event like this? Another possible question would be, why use all of these particular elements? To assume for a moment that this incident truly was scripted, the reason why someone would do it is evidenced by the observable results. Instead of a 500 ft. chasm between races and political parties, we now have a 5,000 ft. one. The people who were always racist now have an excuse to put it fully on display and wave it around like a flag, and those who lived with disdain for the opposing political party now have even more ammunition to use against them- All this while creating an atmosphere of fear and mistrust, which then may lead to drastic changes for “peace and safety” at some point.
To answer the question, if this were a staged event, why were those particular elements used? Eastern Europe is known throughout much of the right-leaning online male community as the last bastion of traditional values in the World. In my personal observations, that isn’t remotely true, yet the image or the delusion persists. Using a blonde-haired (often portrayed as angelic) refugee (victim) from that particular region (traditional values) is full of archetypes that can hit consciously or unconsciously, since some people don’t know how they’ve been programmed to react by society for most of their lives with signs and symbols.
On the other side of the situation, we have a relatively young Black man who has been released numerous times into the public due to what some people call “soft-on-crime” policies, which are usually attributed to more left-leaning politicians, parties, and authorities, who, after committing the stabbing, walks through the train saying, “I got that White girl,” as though he didn’t want anybody to miss that detail. There are also several Black passengers who all behave indifferently to the incident, igniting tensions further after the stabbing itself.
Because of opposing contributing factors which hit the general public right where they are vulnerable, a situation full of chaos and division is likely to erupt and has already begun doing so. String enough of these kinds of incidents together and you have much more than just hateful and threatening rhetoric. Such incidents can and do occur without any secret plots or conspiracies behind them, but given the understanding that psychologists have in terms of action and reaction of human beings on a public scale, crafting a situation like this to create the aforementioned results is almost too easy.
In contrast to the stabbing, there was no instinct or visible red flag that led me to question the authenticity of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, though I do question whether or not a 22 year-old with no formal training has the skill to hit the neck area of a human target 200 yards away with one shot from a sniper rifle. That’s just my curious nature, and my main point is not to say I know everything that happened in either situation. Unlike internet fact-checkers, who usually determine the outcome of a situation before all the evidence has been gathered and ask no questions, I ask questions that some people are afraid to ask, or afraid to know the answer to. When we stop asking questions and accept everything we see and hear on a surface level, that is when truly anything can happen, and we’ll believe it and we won’t do a thing about it. I won’t even get started on all the inconsistencies and red flags that appeared on 9/11. There’s not enough print available for that kind of analysis.
Relevant notes of interest:
In early 2025, Decarlos Brown Jr. was arrested in what was deemed to be a misuse of the 911 emergency service, claiming there was a “man-made substance” in his body that controlled him.
In 2018, during President Trump’s first term, Nia Wilson, an 18 year-old African-American woman, was stabbed at the MacArthur BART Station in Oakland, California by John Lee Cowell, 27, a man of European descent. Nia’s sister Tashiya was also stabbed in the neck but survived, while Nia died moments after being stabbed. President Trump made no public speech to condemn the incident, which highlights selective outrage and possible political motivations rather than ethical concerns regarding communicating about and taking action on public acts of violence.
Two years before Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Charlie questioned a state actor who has been accused of pulling off more than one large-scale false-flag incident about committing such an incident in their own country, publicly and on video. Two weeks before his death, he received an invitation from the head of that state, with Charlie's response left in ambiguity — No one confirming whether he accepted or denied the invitation.
