Man arrested in Oakland train station stabbings
The hunt for a man police say killed an 18-year-old woman in an unprovoked knife attack in the San Francisco Bay Area ended where it began: in a train station.
John Cowell, 27, a recently paroled robber with a vio- lent history, was peacefully arrested on an Antioch-bound train Monday night about 12 miles from the Oakland station where investigators believe he killed Nia Wilson and wounded her sister Sunday night.
“This is the first step to achieving justice for Nia and her family,” Bay Area Rapid Transit Police Chief Carlos Rojas told reporters.
A phone call from a train rider led police to stop and search a Richmond-bound train at the MacArthur Station in Oakland but Cowell wasn’t aboard, Rojas said.
“About 10 minutes later after we got the call, another patron told us the subject got on an Antioch-bound train,” Rojas said.
That train was stopped at the Pleasant Hill station in Walnut Park, northeast of Oakland. Cowell was on board and was arrested without incident. It wasn’t immediately known if Cowell had a lawyer.
Asked how a wanted man could have gotten back into the BART system, Rojas said he didn’t immediately know but said the public transportation system is “porous”
and large.
Rojas said police officers were on duty at the MacArthur station where the attack took place but wasn’t sure it could have been prevented because of the suddenness of the unprovoked and possibly random attack.
In a “prison-style attack,” Cowell stabbed Nia Wilson twice in the neck and then attacked her sister before flee-
ing and apparently removing his pants and sweatshirt to evade capture, Rojas said. The knife believed to have been used in the attack was found at a nearby construction site.
Letifah Wilson, 26, said that she, Nia and a third sister had been returning from a family outing when they were “blindsided by a maniac.” “He didn’t know us, we
didn’t know him,” Wilson said.
“I looked back and he was wiping off his knife and stood at the stairs and just looked. From then on, I was caring for my sister,” she told ABC7 News on Monday, speaking outside a family member’s home with a bandage on her neck.
The women’s father, Ansar Muhammad, said one of his daughters called him, crying hysterically, and told him to get to the MacArthur station.
“It’s nothing imaginable, seeing your child on the BART platform with a yellow tarp
over her body,” Muhammad said Monday evening. “That is an image I’ll never forget for the rest of my life. So I want justice. All I want is justice.”
Surveillance video on the train and at the station’s platform showed Cowell had been riding the same car as the sisters Sunday, but they did not interact, Rojas said.
A motive for the attack remained unclear. Rojas said Cowell hasn’t been con- nected to any radical or white supremacist groups, although he added: “We are going to explore all options and all possibilities.”
The victims were black and Cowell is white.
Monday night, Oakland City Councilmember Lynette McElhaney said she had spoken to the district attorney and was told that Cowell will be arraigned today and the office hasn’t ruled out charging him with a hate crime.
O akland Mayor Libby Schaaf issued a statement
acknowledging that there currently was no evidence that the attack was racially motivated but “the fact that his victims were both young African-American women stirs deep pain and palpable fear in all of us who acknowledge the reality that our country still suffers from a tragic
and deeply racist history.” A Monday night vigil held at the MacArthur BART station later swelled into a crowd of about a thousand that marched downtown, police said.
Cowell was released from state prison May 6 after completing a two-year sentence for second-degree robbery, said Vicky Waters, spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.