In March 2014, the day after Charlotte mayor Patrick Cannon was arrested on bribery charges, then-city manager Ron Carlee stood before reporters and spoke in clipped, deliberate phrases.
“This event. Does not affect. How the City of Charlotte operates on a day-to-day basis.”
The 13-minute press conference was as strong a public response to a crisis as we’ve seen in recent memory from a Charlotte public official. His service wasn’t eloquence, but clarity: Losing a mayor didn’t mean trash would pile up, water lines would start bursting like geysers, and the city would fall into anarchy.
“Charlotte is more than just one man,” Carlee said. “Yesterday the utility department treated 91 million gallons of drinking water, performed over 600 service account orders. Today the solid waste department collected on 60 routes, serving 38,000 households. Through 11 a.m. this morning, 311 answered over 1,200 calls within one second.”
Carlee wasn’t perfect — he was at the center of other controversies later — but when the city needed someone to speak clearly and say, “we’ve got this,” he delivered.
I’ve been thinking about that this week, after the murder of 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska at a light rail stop in South End.
The crushing details of her life and death pinged around the world. She emigrated from Ukraine with her mother and siblings in August 2022, six months after Russia’s invasion. She was creative and dreamed of being a veterinary assistant, according to a vivid obituary. Then, at the East-West light rail stop on a late-summer Friday night, a man stabbed her to death. Police are charging 34-year-old Decarlos Brown Jr. with first-degree murder. He has severe mental illness; WSOC reported that his mother said he’d been diagnosed with schizophrenia. He did not know Zarutska, police say, and that randomness left her fellow passengers shaken.
Crime has been in the news in Charlotte over the past few months, especially since a string of shootings in uptown in July. CMPD points to statistics that show that crime, including homicides, is down from last year.
But facts don’t always align with individual truths. Perceptions become realities.
Random attacks are more searing than stats.
Andrew Dunn wrote in the Observer that, “If we decide this is just another tragic headline in a fast-growing city, then Charlotte will have lost part of its soul.” He’s right today.
And he would’ve also been right six years ago, when a young mother named Kendal Crank was killed in the crossfire of a shootout while driving on North Tryon Street at 28th Street. (Two men pleaded guilty to that crime earlier this month.) I remember former police chief Kerr Putney being visibly frustrated by the lack of outrage from the community, and the lack of help from witnesses. He was right, too. I drive North Tryon at least once a week, and every trip, I think of her. Then, on Tuesday this week, another shooting occurred near the exact same location on North Tryon.
“Charlotte is by and large a safe city,” mayor Vi Lyles said in a statement to WSOC. The statement covered the challenges with mental health in the community, along with homelessness and the justice system. All very true. Brown’s arrival at that train stop, in that state, is the result of maybe thousands of circumstances and “gaps in the system.” Courts, the mental health system, schools, the nonprofit network — or funding for all of the above — could all be partially to blame.
It’s even muddier when you consider that the state runs the courts, the county runs mental health, and the city runs policing. It’s nearly impossible to move them all in the same direction at once. The state Senate has included 10 full-time assistant district attorneys in Mecklenburg in its appropriations bill — which would help the DA’s office with its backlog of cases — but the legislature has yet to agree on a full budget.
The trouble with everybody being at fault is that nobody assumes responsibility.
Most of Charlotte’s top elected and hired leaders are smart and thoughtful, despite what you see on social media. The city’s actually far more stable than it was 11 years ago when Carlee said what he said. Hell, we had five mayors in two-plus years between 2013 to 2015.
But in moments like these, people don’t want measured responses that appeal to their minds. They want leaders to soothe their hearts and souls. They want someone to go off script, to be raw and real, and to say: “This hurts. People are dying before they should die. And we will not rest until we fix it.”
If an attack occurred at a company headquarters, the CEO and president would speak, security would outline changes, and HR would offer counseling. Leaders could do the same.
I’m speaking as a writer who’s listening to people around town, as a columnist who’s admittedly shared the statistics-over-feelings and nuance-over-bluntness messages, as a person who (again) has a great deal of respect for our leaders, and as a user of transit.
My kids and I love the light rail. They’d ride all day and night if they could. Once, riding with my then-3-year-old, he started quacking like a duck. This was the middle of the day. A man a few feet away, shaking and intoxicated, suddenly shouted at him, “SHUT THE FUCK UP.” A primal part of me wanted to kick the man in the face; a calmer part felt worried about his health. In the end I nodded and hushed my son, because my job then wasn’t to settle a score or consider a larger societal crisis; it was to protect the little boy.
Thankfully the next stop was ours, and we got off. Every ride since, I’ve wondered if I’d see him again.