The State Failed Him”: Tracey Brown, Sister of Accused Killer Decarlos Brown Jr., Reveals His Long Battle with Paranoid Schizophrenia and Claims He Blamed a “Chip in His Body” for the Murder of Iryna Zarutska
Tracey Brown, 31, describes a years-long descent into madness that saw her brother become violent, delusional, and a danger to everyone around him, culminating in a jailhouse phone call where he claimed it wasn’t him who killed Zarutska, but “the material in his body.”
Tracey Brown’s stunning revelations paint a picture not of a cold-blooded killer, but of a man lost to an untreated disease—a man she desperately tried to get help for, only to be blocked by a bureaucratic system that she says is as culpable in Zarutska’s death as her brother.
“He was not safe. He was a high risk. We knew it,” she said, her voice trembling with a mixture of grief and fury. “The state failed him. And now an innocent woman is dead because of it.”
Her account provides a chilling counter-narrative to the public condemnation of her brother, suggesting the tragedy that unfolded on a Charlotte light rail train was not merely an act of random violence, but the predictable and preventable outcome of a broken system.
While it offers no comfort to the grieving family of Iryna Zarutska, it raises profound and disturbing questions about the revolving door between prison and the streets for the severely mentally ill, and who bears the ultimate responsibility when the cries for help go unanswered.
“The Brother I Knew Was Already Gone”
For Tracey Brown, the man the world now sees as a monster was once her protector. Growing up in a small house in west Charlotte, Decarlos was the quintessential older brother—teasing, tough, but fiercely loyal.
It was in his late twenties, she recalls, that the brother she knew began to disappear, replaced by a suspicious, agitated stranger. The change was gradual at first, then terrifyingly rapid.
“He started talking about people following him,” Tracey recounted, sitting in the living room of her small apartment, a stack of medical paperwork and court documents on the coffee table in front of her.
“Then it became the government. He’d whisper, pointing at the TV, saying they were sending him messages. We thought it was just stress, maybe drugs, but it got so much darker.”
The official diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia came during a brief, court-ordered psychiatric hold in 2021. The delusions, Tracey said, became more specific and more bizarre. “He was obsessed with the idea that the government had implanted a chip in him. He’d scratch at his arm, his neck, trying to get it out. He said it controlled his thoughts, made him do things.”
This delusion, she says, is at the heart of his defense. In a recorded phone call from the Mecklenburg County Jail last week, a conversation she shared with reporters, her brother’s voice is flat, detached, and chillingly disconnected from reality.
When she tearfully asked him why he would do such a thing, he responded without emotion: “That wasn’t me, Tracey. You know it wasn’t me. It was the material in my body. They made it happen.”
The family’s nightmare with Decarlos’s illness reached a violent crescendo in the spring of 2022. In an incident that led to his last prison sentence for aggravated assault, he attacked Tracey in their mother’s home.
“He was convinced I was a government agent sent to monitor him,” she said, unconsciously rubbing her forearm where a faint scar is still visible. “He broke down my bedroom door, screaming about the chip. He bit me on the arm, just… like an animal. I looked in his eyes, and my brother wasn’t there. The brother I knew was already gone.”
