How a Murder in Charlotte Shaped Reactions to Charlie Kirk’s Killing

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At his Friday morning press conference on the killing of Charlie Kirk, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox made an emotional digression about the horrific footage of Kirk being shot. “Social media is a cancer on our society,” the Republican told reporters. “We have not evolved in a way that we are capable of processing those types of violent imagery. It is not good for us. It is not good to consume.”

He was talking about Kirk, but also about the Aug. 22 death of Iryna Zarutska, whose killing on a light rail train in Charlotte, North Carolina, was captured by surveillance cameras. That footage, which was released on Sept. 5, went megaviral on the right-wing internet last weekend—and set the stage for the reaction to Kirk’s death in more ways than one.

For Cox, as for many people online, the inescapable videos of the two killings, one after another, represented the lawless and corrosive nature of social media, serving up gruesome snuff films in the limitless pursuit of views. But the footage of Zarutska’s death also prompted fury among right-wing influencers and politicians against liberals, Democrats, and the media—a fury that Kirk’s assassination quickly intensified. When Elon Musk wrote on Wednesday that “the Left is the party of murder,” he was continuing a weeklong message on that theme, one that included dozens of missives about the Ukrainian refugee’s death in a Charlotte train car. On Friday, Musk shared two side-by-side A.I.-generated images of graffiti-style stencils: a smiling, handsome Kirk, and a cowering, dying Zarutska.

The footage of Zarutska’s last moments, captured by a surveillance camera, is as hard to watch as Kirk’s. It appears to show 34-year-old Decarlos Brown Jr. rising from his seat on a Charlotte light rail train to stab an unsuspecting Zarutska in the neck with a pocketknife. She turns to face him, confused, and brings her hands to her face, before collapsing on the floor as he walks off. Brown, who had been arrested 14 times, serving several years in prison for armed robbery and subsequently being diagnosed with schizophrenia, later told his sister “the material in his body” had compelled him to kill her.

It is hard to overstate the extent to which Zarutska’s death inflamed the MAGA movement. President Donald Trump shared a photo of her last moments in a video from the Resolute Desk on Tuesday, a supporting argument for deploying the military to American cities. Many Republicans seized on Brown’s criminal history, his release by a judge after repeated 911 calls that revealed mental health problems, and Mecklenburg County’s prior efforts to reduce its jail population to reinforce their view that Democrats are soft on crime.

It’s an accusation that goes back to Lee Atwater and George H.W. Bush’s 1988 Willie Horton ad, which painted Michael Dukakis as an enabler of violent crime, but the language has lately gotten (a lot) stronger. Two weeks ago, Stephen Miller called the Democratic Party a “domestic extremist organization.” Vice President J.D. Vance shared a photo of Zarutska after she was stabbed, arguing that her killing retroactively justified Daniel Penny’s fatal chokehold of Jordan Neely on a New York City subway train. (In that case, Neely was unarmed; Penny was acquitted.)

Vance was not the first person to make the connection. Why had the deaths of George Floyd and Jordan Neely gotten wall-to-wall media coverage, while Zarutska’s did not garner coverage in the New York Times until two weeks after her death? One answer to that question is that the outcomes of those first two cases were very much in doubt: It was a tricky, divisive issue to assess the culpability and intent of a police officer or a subway vigilante, and both incidents were instantly scrutinized by millions on video. (Brown, by contrast, was immediately arrested and charged.)

Another answer, proffered by Ben Shapiro on Fox News over a slideshow of the dead woman’s bikini photos: The media was ignoring Zarutska because she was white and the alleged killer was Black. “That does not match up with the media narrative about white supremacy in the United States,” he said. This was a “White Lives Matter” moment. The conservative podcaster Matt Walsh wrote: “This is Rosa Parks, but orders of magnitude worse.”

But it wasn’t just the New York Times that had neglected the murder at first. The incident did not gain traction on X, either, until the Charlotte transit agency released its footage on Sept. 5, two weeks after the murder. At that point, Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles wrote, “I want to thank our media partners and community members who have chosen not to repost or share the footage out of respect for Iryna’s family.” That pact to respect the dignity of the deceased, redolent of the old-school media environment, where gory films had to be sought out on LiveLeak, did not last.

Instead, it struck right-wing observers as an attempted cover-up. “Thanking left-wing media for conspiring with you to hide violent crime victims and downplay your crime problem is one approach,” wrote the Federalist editor Mollie Hemingway. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy wrote: “Charlotte’s Mayor doesn’t want the media to show you the ugly truth.” And Benny Johnson exhorted his followers: “This is the full, uncensored video of Iryna Zarutska getting slaughtered. After 5 stabs in the neck with a knife she slowly loses consciousness and collapses into a pool of blood, terrified and alone. Don’t look away.”

They weren’t wrong that the video made all the difference in elevating Zarutska’s death from local tragedy to national story (though whether that’s a story about “Black crime,” the failure of criminal justice reform, or an underfunded system for psychiatric treatment depends on whom you’re reading). The video is scary and gory, but also devastatingly sad. It has played on repeat on X for days, posted over and over again by giant accounts with millions of followers. Democrats have tried to argue against Trump’s National Guard deployments by wielding statistics that show homicides in cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Detroit dropping to their lowest level in generations. In the stabbing video, MAGA found its counterpoint.

In its grotesque violence and sudden ubiquity, the Charlotte footage anticipated the awful spectacle of Kirk’s killing on Wednesday, which was broadcast to everyone from teenagers in their classrooms and co-workers in their cubicles within minutes on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and X. But the reaction was different. No one promoted the video for revealing some hidden societal truth. Musk did not share it. He did, however, share yet another image of the dying Zarutska—in a tweet where Charlie Kirk had captioned her photo, “America will never be the same.” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, who shared the video of Zarutska’s murder and photos of her bloody body just days before on X, called on social media companies to remove video of Kirk’s assassination. His death was sacred; hers was a meme.

Not long ago, the decision to disseminate such footage was the anguished province of social media regulators and television editors, with open access reserved for snuff film junkies on LiveLeak. Now the choice—to see or not to see a person get murdered on camera—lies with each of us. It’s only going to become a more frequent dilemma as streamers, surveillance cameras, and wearable glasses leave fewer moments of reality unrecorded. Tape of someone dying can be a powerful wake-up call, as the Black Lives Matter movement demonstrated. Images of bloodshed in Gaza have proliferated on X, changing the politics of the war. Withholding images of graphic violence can keep people from confronting the truth, as some observers have alleged about school shootings and war. But one video does not show a society’s truth any more than one remark shows a man’s character.

A video of a murder does, however, stick in your mind. It disgusts. And then it desensitizes. Gov. Spencer Cox closed his press conference with some advice for us all: “I would encourage people to log off, turn off, touch grass, hug a family member, go out and do good in your community. Do we escalate or do we find an off-ramp? It’s a choice, and every one of us gets to make that choice.”

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