Seventeen days. That’s how long it took for the national networks to acknowledge the brutal killing of Iryna Zarutska, a young Ukrainian refugee murdered aboard a Charlotte light rail train.
Nearly three weeks passed before the legacy media finally deemed the story worthy of prime time coverage—and when they did, NBC could not resist filtering the tragedy through their favorite lens: Donald Trump.
On September 8th, NBC Nightly News aired a segment on Zarutska’s murder. The footage itself was horrific, showing the young woman quietly scrolling on her phone before being ambushed by repeat offender Decarlos Brown Jr., who stabbed her three times, fatally wounding her. The facts alone should have been more than enough to justify wall-to-wall reporting. Yet NBC’s framing revealed the deeper game at play.
Anchor Tom Llamas introduced the piece with a teaser that immediately set the narrative: “…and why President Trump is commenting on the attack.” Viewers tuning in weren’t invited to focus on the crime itself, the breakdown of public safety, or the policies that allowed a violent repeat offender to roam free. Instead, the real story, NBC suggested, was Trump’s reaction.
Someone gets murdered and your primary concern is accusing people of racism for noticing.
Just astonishing what you’ll do for money. https://t.co/U8OkLQlpms
— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) September 9, 2025
Correspondent Jesse Kirsch then delivered the details—Zarutska’s immigrant background, Brown’s lengthy criminal record, the chilling surveillance footage. But rather than closing with accountability for failed bail policies or examining the system that repeatedly released a man with 14 arrests, the report pivoted to Trump. Kirsch noted the president’s condemnation of Democrats for enabling violent crime, framing his remarks as a controversial twist rather than a predictable, fact-based critique.
The piece ended by elevating Democratic Governor Josh Stein, complete with his partisan identification, to provide the “responsible” counterweight to Trump. In effect, NBC turned a gruesome murder into yet another chapter in the endless Trump vs. Democrats narrative—a form of what can only be called Trumpwashing.
This isn’t new. The murders of Laken Riley, Jocelyn Nungaray, and Rachel Morin followed the same pattern. The networks ignored the stories until a video went viral, an immigration status was revealed, or Trump made a statement. Only then did they swoop in—late, reluctant, and eager to reframe the narrative around politics rather than public safety.
ABC managed to deliver a more straightforward report, omitting the political posturing. CBS, on the other hand, mentioned the story once in its morning broadcast and skipped it altogether by evening. Meanwhile, filler segments on local crime and human interest pieces filled the airtime.
