In a cramped Huntersville apartment, where the hum of a secondhand refrigerator competes with the distant wail of Charlotte’s light rail, Mykola Zarutsky, 19, sits hunched over his sister’s battered iPhone. The screen, cracked from a fall during her final commute, flickers as he taps play for the 27th time. The voicemail, timestamped 9:45 p.m. on August 22, 2025, carries Iryna Zarutska’s voice—soft, lilting, unmistakably hers—speaking in Ukrainian: “Mykola, I’m on the train. Work was crazy, but I’m okay. Come home soon ❤️.” The words, infused with the warmth of a sister who’d become his anchor in a foreign land, are a knife to his heart. But it’s the last three seconds that haunt him most: a faint, unintelligible voice in the background, not Iryna’s, murmuring something just beyond comprehension. “It’s there, every time,” Mykola whispers, eyes bloodshot from sleepless nights. “Someone was with her. But who? And why can’t we hear them?”

Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, was stabbed to death minutes after leaving that voicemail, her life snuffed out on Charlotte’s Lynx Blue Line by Decarlos Dejuan Brown Jr., a 34-year-old man with a history of untreated schizophrenia. The brutality of her murder—three knife wounds, one severing her carotid artery—shocked a city still grappling with rising transit violence. But it’s this audio enigma, revealed by Mykola in an exclusive interview with The Charlotte Observer, that has deepened the tragedy’s mystery. The unidentified voice, captured in a fleeting moment before Iryna’s death, has sparked a firestorm of speculation. Was it a bystander’s warning? A taunt from her killer? Or something more spectral—a glitch in time, as her family half-believes, tying Iryna to the war-torn home she fled? As police, forensic experts, and amateur sleuths dissect the recording, the Zarutskas’ grief collides with a desperate quest for answers, forcing readers to confront unsettling questions: Can a whisper from the grave point to justice, or does it merely amplify the void left by loss?

A Voice from Kyiv to Charlotte: Iryna’s Unyielding Spirit

Iryna Zarutska’s story begins in Kyiv’s Podil district, where cobblestone streets and golden-domed churches framed her childhood. Born in 2002 to Olena, a seamstress, and Viktor, a printing press engineer, she was the eldest of three siblings, a dreamer with a knack for sketching folklore sprites in her notebooks. Her father’s gift—a blue ballpoint pen from his factory—became her talisman, tucked into her pocket through school exams and, later, the chaos of war. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Iryna, then 19 and studying art restoration, fled with her mother, sister Sofia, and Mykola, crossing borders to Romania, then Germany, before landing in Charlotte via the Uniting for Ukraine program in June 2022. Viktor stayed behind, conscripted to Kyiv’s defenses, his letters dwindling as shelling intensified.

In Charlotte, Iryna rebuilt with quiet ferocity. At Tony’s Pizzeria in South End, she slung pizzas, her broken English charming customers who tipped extra for her smile. Off-hours, she sketched digital art for an Etsy shop—vibrant pysanky eggs and Cossack warriors—saving for graphic design classes at Central Piedmont Community College. “She was our sun,” Sofia, 21, says, clutching Iryna’s sketchbook, its margins filled with blue-ink doodles. “She’d call Mykola ‘little warrior,’ teach him slang like ‘lit’ to fit in at school.” Mykola, a lanky high school senior, relied on Iryna’s voicemails—daily pep talks left when he missed her calls due to classes or soccer practice. “She’d say, ‘Come home soon,’ like a code. Meant she missed me, even if I was just at school.”

Her life wasn’t without shadows. Journal entries, shared posthumously, reveal fears of being “watched” on her train rides home. “America’s safe, but not the trains,” she wrote in July 2025. “Eyes follow you, and not all are kind.” Her boyfriend, Alexei Kovacs, 25, noticed her growing unease, urging her to take Lyft instead. But Iryna, frugal and stubborn, insisted on the Lynx, clutching her father’s pen like a shield. “She’d twirl it when nervous,” Alexei recalls, his voice breaking. “Said it kept Papa close.”

The Fatal Night: A Voicemail’s Final Echoes

August 22, 2025, unfolded routinely until it didn’t. Iryna’s shift at Tony’s ended at 9:15 p.m., a blur of tourists and pizza orders. “She was joking about her scooter, how it’d be faster than the train,” her manager, Rosa Mendoza, recalls. Grabbing a half-eaten cheese pizza box—a leftover she’d take home for Mykola—Iryna boarded the Lynx Blue Line at Scaleybark station at 9:46 p.m., bound for East/West Boulevard, a four-minute ride. At 9:45 p.m., she left her final voicemail, her voice steady despite the train’s clatter: “Mykola, I’m on the train. Work was crazy, but I’m okay. Come home soon ❤️.”

The Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS) footage, released September 5 under public pressure, captures the horror that followed. At 9:48 p.m., Decarlos Brown Jr. enters the train car, his movements erratic, muttering to himself. A fare-dodger with a history of mental health crises, he’d slipped past CATS officers earlier. At 9:50 p.m., he attacks without warning, his dollar-store pocketknife slicing Iryna’s neck, shoulder, and knee. She collapses, blood pooling, as four passengers—a nurse, two students, and a retiree—rush to help. The nurse, Maria Gonzalez, later told police, “She was gasping, whispering something—maybe Ukrainian. Her hand went to her pocket, then the pizza box.”

That box, now infamous, was Iryna’s final canvas. At 9:51 p.m., as the train halted, she pulled out her father’s blue pen and scribbled on the box’s lid, the act caught on camera: five seconds of frantic strokes, a pause, then a slump. The pen fell; the box stayed. But when police bagged it as evidence, the writing—seen clearly in footage—had vanished, no ink or indentations detectable. This mystery, paired with the voicemail’s ghostly voice, has gripped Charlotte, fueling X threads and true-crime podcasts like Echoes of the Blue Line.

The Haunting Three Seconds: A Voice Beyond Iryna’s

Mykola discovered the voicemail the morning after Iryna’s death, sent to CMPD’s homicide unit by 10 a.m. on August 23. He’d played it twice before noticing the anomaly: in the final three seconds, as Iryna’s “Come home soon ❤️” fades, a low, indistinct voice murmurs. “It’s not her,” Mykola insists, replaying it for this reporter on a Bluetooth speaker. The sound is muffled, like a whisper through static, possibly male, possibly English, though some hear Ukrainian or even a distorted laugh. “I’ve played it 27 times—27, because that’s how old she’d be next May,” he says, his hands trembling. “It’s someone else on that train. Was it him? Or… something else?”

Forensic audio experts, hired by CMPD and supplemented by private analysis from the Zarutskas’ GoFundMe funds, are stumped. Dr. Emily Tran, a UNC Charlotte audio engineer, ran the file through spectrographic software, isolating the background. “It’s human, not ambient noise—maybe 60-70 decibels, low-pitched, 2-3 words,” she says. “But the train’s rumble and Iryna’s voice obscure it. Enhancement pulls up nothing distinct—no phonemes we can pin.” Theories range: Was it Brown, muttering before the attack? A passenger’s casual remark? Or, as Mykola half-wonders, “Papa’s voice, somehow, reaching her?” Viktor, still in Kyiv, dismisses this as grief’s fantasy but admits, “Her pen, her voice—they were my thread to her. Maybe God let her hear me one last time.”

The family’s pain is compounded by the voicemail’s public leak on September 10, posted to an X thread by @CLTTrueCrime, a local sleuth with 15K followers. The clip, downloaded 80,000 times before moderators yanked it, sparked wild speculation: some hear “Get out” in English, others “Berezhis” (Ukrainian for “Be careful”). A fringe Reddit group, r/ParanoidCharlotte, claims it’s a “ghost echo,” tying it to Ukrainian folklore about spirits warning loved ones. Olena, a devout Orthodox Christian, scoffs but admits, “Iryna loved those old tales. If she sent a sign, it’d be like this.”

The Suspect’s Descent: A Mind Unraveled, a System Unmoored

Decarlos Brown Jr.’s role in this tragedy is undisputed but layered. Arrested at 9:53 p.m. on the platform, his knife still bloody, he faces federal charges under 18 U.S.C. § 1992 for transit-related murder, alongside state first-degree murder counts. His life, pieced together from court filings and family interviews, is a grim mosaic: 14 arrests since 2007, including a 2014 robbery stint; diagnosed schizophrenia in 2010, untreated since 2020; and 911 calls in 2025 reporting “demons in wires.” His mother, Tanya Brown, begged for commitment, but North Carolina’s criteria—imminent danger—barred it. “He was a ghost in the system,” she told WSOC-TV. “They’d arrest him, release him, repeat.”

On the train, Brown’s behavior—caught on CATS cameras—suggests delusion, not premeditation. He paced, laughed, and clutched a crumpled paper, later found to be a grocery list scrawled with “eyes watching.” Did he speak the words in Iryna’s voicemail? Audio analysis can’t confirm; his voice sample, taken post-arrest, is too slurred by medication. His lawyer, public defender Marcus Hill, argues diminished capacity: “Decarlos wasn’t a predator—he was a patient, failed by a state with 16-day psych bed waitlists.” DA Spencer Baugh counters: “Mental illness isn’t a free pass to kill.”

The voicemail’s voice fuels darker theories. Could it be a second assailant, missed by cameras? CMPD’s Detective Lara Chen dismisses this: “Footage shows Brown alone near her.” Yet, X users like @Justice4Iryna speculate about accomplices, citing CATS’s spotty camera coverage (12% of cars unmonitored in 2024). Others point to Brown’s muttering: Was he talking to himself, or responding to Iryna’s call?

The Pizza Box Enigma: A Sister’s Lost Words

The voicemail’s mystery intertwines with the pizza box’s vanishing ink, deepening the case’s surreal edge. Surveillance shows Iryna scribbling furiously post-attack, her father’s pen leaving visible marks. Yet, forensic tests found no residue—no blue ink, no scratches, despite ballpoint’s permanence. “It’s physically impossible,” says Dr. Raj Patel, a UNC forensic chemist. “Even blood wouldn’t erase it without chemical traces.” Mykola theorizes the pen’s ink, from Viktor’s Soviet-era factory, might fade under heat or humidity, but Patel debunks this: “Not in seven minutes, not without residue.”

The box, now in CMPD’s evidence locker, is under re-examination after Mykola’s insistence. Was the writing a name? A plea? A mirror of the voicemail’s “Come home soon”? Olena clings to hope: “Maybe she wrote to Viktor, to say goodbye.” Alexei, analyzing stills nightly, believes it was a warning: “She sensed him—Brown—before the knife. She was sharp like that.” The family’s GoFundMe, raising $160,000, funds private tests, but results are weeks away.

A City’s Reckoning: Grief, Reform, and Unanswered Whispers

Iryna’s death has galvanized Charlotte. A September 22 vigil at East/West Boulevard drew 600, blue pens raised skyward, echoing her father’s gift. Mayor Vi Lyles pledged $2.5 million for CATS upgrades: AI fare checks, crisis intervention teams. Ukrainian expats, via the Charlotte Slavic Center, demand transit marshals, citing 2024’s 27% spike in train assaults. Nationally, the case fuels mental health debates: Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) pushes a $100M psych funding bill, while Gov. Roy Cooper calls Iryna’s death “a failure of systems, not just one man.”

Globally, Ukraine’s diaspora mourns. Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted: “Iryna carried our spirit across oceans, only to fall to America’s shadows.” Al Jazeera’s Kyiv bureau framed her as “war’s ripple victim,” linking displacement to vulnerability. On X, #IrynaZarutska trends, with 1.4M posts—some demand Brown’s life sentence, others decry deinstitutionalization’s toll.

The Voice That Lingers: A Family’s Plea

Mykola plays the voicemail daily, now on his 28th listen. “It’s her, but it’s not just her,” he says, eyes on the phone. Sofia, sketching Iryna’s face in her sister’s style, adds: “That voice—it’s like she’s still trying to tell us something.” Olena, clutching Viktor’s latest letter, believes it’s a call to act: “She’d want us to fix this—trains, minds, broken things.”

The inquiry into the voice continues, with CMPD crowdsourcing audio tips via a hotline (704-555-0193). Experts warn of auditory pareidolia—humans imposing meaning on noise—but Mykola rejects this. “It’s real. Someone was there, or something was.” Readers, weigh in: Is it Brown’s delusion, a stranger’s echo, or a sister’s final bridge to home? As Charlotte’s trains rumble on, Iryna’s whisper demands we listen—lest her words, like her ink, fade forever.