When 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska was murdered in Charlotte in August 2025, no one had any idea that outrage over her senseless death would go national and international.
Many were sickened not just over the fact that she was stabbed to death as she attempted to go home from her job, but that her alleged killer, 34-year-old Decarlos Brown Jr., was a violent repeat offender whose own mother has said in so many words that he should not have been on the streets.
Laws were changed here in North Carolina. Congressional hearings were held over her death. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance also talked about her killing, with Trump vowing justice to Iryna’s mother, Anna, during his February State of the Union address to the nation, which Mrs. Zarutska attended as a guest of the president.
Tribute videos to Iryna were put together and posted on social media websites like YouTube and Instagram. Poems were written about her life. Vigils were held in cities near and far from Charlotte. Her case struck a chord with a lot of people, in part because every bit of the horrific crime was caught on video.
Murals even began to go up in some parts of the country to the extent that, at some point, X CEO Elon Musk donated $1 million to help fund them.
One city where a mural was supposed to be painted was Providence, Rhode Island. The owners of the Dark Lady LGBTQ club agreed to let one be painted on the side of their uptown building, not to make a political statement but because they believed her memory should be honored.
Though the club owners were lifelong Democrats, outrage commenced in the Democrat-run city to the extent that the owners didn’t even want to do media interviews to address the backlash. They even had to put out a statement assuring the locals that they weren’t fans of Trump, but they thought her life should be remembered.
Incredibly, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley, a Democrat, called the mural — which was halfway complete at the time — “divisive,” while stating, “This has not brought us closer together as a community; in fact, it has been quite divisive and even a little bit ugly.”
Left out of his remarks, of course, is that the divisiveness started thanks to supposedly tolerant Democrats in Rhode Island like Smiley, who were perfectly OK with murals of leftist icons like George Floyd but not a woman who was stabbed to death after she came to America from war-torn Ukraine in hopes of making a better life.
Making matters worse was Democratic state Rep. David Morales, who proclaimed, “Ultimately, we want to make sure that every community member who calls Providence home feels safe,” while not explaining how a literal piece of artwork could make anyone feel unsafe and also leaving out whether he believed women like Iryna Zarutska also had a right to feel safe.
“We can both agree that this mural behind us does not reflect Providence’s values, nor does it reflect the creativity that we would want to see in our city,” Morales added without elaborating as to what about it went against Rhode Island’s purported values.
This is one of those things that should transcend politics. But it won’t because apparently Democrats in Rhode Island are afraid of the uncomfortable conversations murals like these tend to spark about their soft-on-crime policies, policies that lead to more innocent people like Iryna Zarutska being victimized.
Though the mural at the LGBTQ club is coming down thanks to the mayor-led outrage mob, it reportedly will be going up elsewhere in the city. The question that remains, though, is why it even had to come to this in the first place.
North Carolina native Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym Sister Toldjah and is a media analyst and regular contributor to RedState and Legal Insurrection.
