Iryna Zarutska’s family is suing the city of Charlotte and a private security company, asking a court to award damages and to force reforms to light rail safety.
The lawsuit, filed on Friday in Charlotte’s Mecklenburg County Superior Court, was lodged by Frank Scott Haskell, Zarutska’s uncle. It accuses the city and Professional Security Services of failing to protect passengers despite being aware of violent crime on and around the municipal light rail line.
According to the filing, the defendants “were responsible for protecting lawful passengers from known and foreseeable danger”, and “Their failures caused the fatal stabbing”, the suit states, according to the Charlotte Observer. The complaint singles out weak fare enforcement, the absence of turnstiles and insufficient security staffing as preventable shortcomings the city could have fixed, the family argues.
The suit says the city had the resources to implement basic protections and that those measures would have averted Zarutska’s death. The family is seeking monetary damages and says it wants the litigation to prompt systemwide security changes on Charlotte’s light rail network.
Zarutska was killed while riding a light rail train home from work, one year before the suit was filed. Authorities charged Decarlos Brown Jr in her killing. In June, a judge ruled Brown incompetent to stand trial due to mental illness.
Relatives say Zarutska arrived in the United States after living in a bomb shelter in Ukraine, fleeing the war to build a safer life. Her killing became a national flashpoint, used by the Trump administration and Republican allies to argue that Democratic-led cities and local judicial practices were failing to protect residents from violent crime.
Lawmakers in North Carolina acted after the case. In September, the state passed Iryna’s Law, which redefined certain violent offenses, imposed bail limits for people charged with violent offenses and ended cashless bond releases in certain circumstances. The new lawsuit now brings the debate back to Charlotte’s courts, where the family aims to force visible changes to transit security and accountability.
