A 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee was brutally killed last month on a city train in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Her name was Iryna Zarutska, and she came to the U.S. to escape the war in her home country, hoping to start a new life — and a better one. Instead, her family buried her.

Video of the attack was made public last Friday and went viral on social media over the weekend, horrifying viewers and raising a fair question: Why aren’t more people talking about this story?

The imagery truly is harrowing, showing the petite Zarutska entering the light rail train and sitting down in front of Decarlos Brown Jr.

After a few moments, Brown takes out a knife, stands up and stabs Zarutska multiple times before walking off the train at the next stop. Dripping blood.

Zarutska tried to stop the bleeding, but she died before paramedics could revive her.

Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles did herself no favors with a response that came across as ill-timed and out of step with the public’s grief. People took issue with comments such as “​​I’ve been thinking hard about what safety really looks like in our city.” The obvious reaction to that statement is that we all wished she would have been thinking about this issue prior to a young woman losing her life in a random act of violence.

She also said “we will never arrest our way out (of) issues such as homelessness and mental health” and said of the mentally ill that they should be “treated with the same compassion, diligence and commitment as cancer or heart disease.”

And, of course, both of those statements are correct.

But the timing? Absolutely wrong.

The mayor may have known the full details of the incident for weeks — Zarutska’s killing took place Aug. 22 — but the public was just finding out how brutal it was. Surely, the grief Zarutska’s friends and family are feeling still is very raw. Such statements shift the focus away from Zarutska and her family and seem to make excuses for her brutal slaying.

Should the mentally ill be treated with compassion? Yes. Should people have a reasonable expectation of safety on public transit? Yes. Both of these things can be true.

Most people suffering mental illness are not likely to pull out a knife and stab the person in front of them on the train. The problem is that the suspect had at least 14 prior arrests, and had served five years for robbery with a deadly weapon in 2014. Reports indicate he had previously been diagnosed with schizophrenia.

This story highlights a growing sense of unease among many women in cities. It underscores safety concerns for people riding public transit more broadly.

There are so many things that could have been done differently. For one, transit officials confirmed Brown Jr. hadn’t paid for passage on the train. That may sound like a small thing, but fare evasion is linked to crime on public transit.

Enforcing fare evasion is a deterrent, and we believe that this approach — trying to stop crime before it happens — is a sensible one that all transit agencies should pursue, including the Chicago Transit Authority.

Likewise, with cameras on the trains in Charlotte, the public could be excused for wondering why there wasn’t a more immediate response after the event. It also was remarkable that passengers — and the train car held plenty of other folks — didn’t react more strongly to the horrific violence.

We hope this killing will inspire broader reforms among U.S. transit agencies to prevent future attacks. What should not happen in the immediate aftermath, however, is for the people most affected by the tragedy to become an afterthought in the scramble to leverage tragedy for political purposes. Already, Zarutska’s story has become a dog whistle for many on the right and an inconvenience for those on the left.

Zarutska was, by all accounts, a bright and hopeful young person who had big dreams for the future. We wish she had sat in a different seat that night. We wish a guard had noticed Brown Jr. skipping fare, or that some other small moment had altered the course of that day. But none did.

Many of us stand with Ukraine as that war-torn country continues to fight against Russian aggression.

Will we now stand and honor the memory of Iryna Zarutska?

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