Commenters on social media are raging against the murder of Iryna Zarutska after full videos of her death were released Tuesday. 

As Republicans in the White House and on Capitol Hill also seek to highlight Zarutska’s killing on a North Carolina light rail train last month, the Department of Justice says it is pursuing the “maximum” penalty against the alleged perpetrator, who is shown on camera stabbing Zarutska in the neck. The justice department now says it may hit the suspect with hate crimes charges, based on Zarutska’s race or gender.

The stabbing of Zarutska at Charlotte in August received even more intense attention on Tuesday, after a popular right-wing commentator, Alex Jones, shared a full video of the stabbing. The video showed the woman cowering in fear on the train after being swiftly stabbed in the neck. She then collapses to the ground, and is seen lying in her own blood. 

By Tuesday afternoon, several key words related to the stabbing were trending online, including “judges,” with nearly 250,000 posts; the name Daniel Penny, who is the white Marine who was acquitted last year after accidentally choking an erratic homeless man to death on the New York City subway, and Iryna, which had 736,000 posts on X alone. 

The alleged killer, Decarlos Brown, who is black, is being accused of killing Zarutska because she was white. The term “I GOT THAT WHITE GIRL” was trending on X on Tuesday, with more than 119,000 posts after the video of the stabbing showed Brown proclaiming those words out loud.

According to Google Trends, the number of Google searches related to the North Carolina stabbing increased by 500 percent nationwide in just the previous 22 hours. 

Many on social media compared the treatment of Zarutska after her murder to that of George Floyd in 2020. Podcaster Megyn Kelly said that the criminal justice reforms that came about both before Floyd’s death and after should be done away with. 

“F— BLM, its bullshit DEI/criminal justice ‘reforms’ the knee-bending candy-ass judges/DAs/pols who went along with the lies about racist policing and who created the revolving door for criminals arrested dozens of times and for the clearly mentally ill & dangerous — all at unspeakable costs to the innocent young women of America,” Ms. Kelly wrote. 

By Tuesday afternoon, the Department of Justice said it was pursuing the maximum penalty for Brown. “We will seek the maximum penalty for this unforgivable act of violence — he will never again see the light of day as a free man,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement. 

The United States attorney for western North Carolina, Russ Ferguson, said he was looking into “every available charge in this case,” including potential hate crimes charges for gender- or race-based violence. 

“We’re looking into every available charge in this case. If we find facts that this was gender-motivated or race-motivated, we will absolutely bring a federal civil rights charge in this case,” Mr. Ferguson told members of the press on Tuesday afternoon. 

The chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Congressman Jim Jordan, says he wants to investigate the judges involved in allowing Brown back on the streets despite his many criminal charges. He has served time in prison for armed robbery. 

“We can definitely look at that … type of sentences that you describe,” Mr. Jordan told a conservative podcaster, Benny Johnson, on his show on Tuesday. “That’s an investigation that has to take place.”