San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Divergent paths meet tragically at BART
Markedly different journeys of victim, man held in killing
Nia Wilson spent her last day doing what she did during so much of her life — shouting in the face of tragedy.
Just hours before she was fatally stabbed with breathtaking suddenness on a BART platform last Sunday, the 18-year-old had been at a poolside barbecue in Martinez with her family. She was honoring the memory of her high school boyfriend who died two years ago. Last week marked what would have been his 18th birthday, and in typical fashion for a woman who posted verses about staying strong through storms, she was choosing assertive optimism over tears.
But that optimistic life ended at 9:38 p.m. as Wilson and one of her sisters were boarding a train at the MacArthur Station, headed
home to Oakland. Striding quickly behind them, a young man stabbed both in the neck with thrusts from the side, then, after standing to watch for a moment, dashed away.
Wilson collapsed into the arms of her wounded sister Lahtifa, 26. People around them were still screaming when police arrived and pointed in different directions to where they thought the attacker had fled. In minutes, Wilson had bled out and was dead on the platform.
John Lee Cowell was snared the next evening in a region-wide manhunt. By then a national furor had erupted over the possible racial implications of the crime, with many assuming that Cowell, who is white, had targeted Wilson because she was black. Police say they have no evidence that race was a factor, but by week’s end many, from local activists to Hollywood celebrities, had taken to social
“Nia was full of life. She had her ups and downs like everybody, but when she was up, she was up.” Marrika Lopes, one of victim’s teachers at Dewey Academy in Oakland
media to cite the killing as an example of the violent oppression of black people in America.
Overshadowed in the furor was the history of two lives that wound utterly separate paths — and then, by the vagary of fate, intersected on that BART platform.
Cowell, 27, now sits in Santa Rita Jail on murder and attempted murder charges, and has refused to speak to investigators about his possible involvement, motive or anything other than a request for a lawyer. Authorities say they have strong evidence in the form of lengthy video footage placing him at the scene and fleeing the station.
For Cowell, a guilty verdict would cap off a misbegotten life that was dealt a bad hand from an early age in Concord. Cowell’s father has done jail time for theft and drug crimes since Cowell was a child. His mother is a mentally ill felon. And since he was in middle school, Cowell has been in so much trouble he has rarely spent more than a few months at a time not being locked up. He had long been homeless when he was arrested Monday.
Meanwhile, Wilson’s large, extended family is faced with having to plan a funeral instead of a party for her expected graduation in December from Dewey Academy high school.
“I will never see my daughter again,” said her father, Amsar El Muhammad. “She will never be able to pursue her dreams. No parent would ever want to go through what I’m going through.”
Growing up in a gritty stretch of East Oakland, Nia Wilson adopted the kind of edge kids gird themselves with to survive. Being a young, black woman in America, let alone a town awash with both poverty and wealth, carries a range of tough challenges, and friends say her daily walk to school was often an ordeal. Sometimes she and her classmates would get solicited by men. Crooks tried to rob them. Pimps tried to recruit them.
Wilson responded to the challenges with buoyant confidence leavened by street-savvy assertiveness.
“I’m not the kind of bitch that needs any kind of sympathy period,” she wrote in one Facebook post. “Ion need nobody to feel bad for me ... I then already been through storm & it ain’t no folding this way.”
Marrika Lopes, one of Wilson’s Dewey Academy teachers, said that sort of spirit perfectly captured the woman she knew.
“Nia was full of life,” Lopes said. “She had her ups and downs like everybody, but when she was up, she was up.” Wilson was her mother and father’s youngest child, and was adored by both of them, said her aunt, Johnette Wilson-Stitt. “She was a daddy’s girl and a mommy’s girl,” she said.
Her parents were separated, and she typically lived with her dad, who works at Highland Hospital, or her grandmother. But Wilson recently spent about two weeks with her sister, Malika Harris. “She came to visit because she wanted to go swimming and stuff,” Harris said. “She loved to swim.”
Harris laughed at their sisterly spats during that time, like Wilson taking her false eyelashes and makeup. Wilson’s mother, Alicia Grayson, also recalled her daughter’s love for beauty, recalling the young woman’s many posts on social media in which she looked immaculately made up and model-worthy.
“Her makeup got on my nerves,” Grayson said with a chuckle last week. “I will miss that makeup.”
Along with that attention to appearance was an ambition to not only join the military after graduation, but to train as an emergency medical technician. Harris said her sister had completed CPR training and showed a penchant for healing.
Wilson’s young life was rocked two years ago when her boyfriend, Josiah “JoJo” Pratt-Rose, and his best friend, both 15, drowned in a lake outside Oakdale (Stanislaus County). The top of her Facebook page carries the names of the two boys in homage — JoJoWorld and JamariWorld — with the words, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
But that particular heartbreak was soon followed by another. Standing outside after Pratt-Rose’s funeral in downtown Oakland, 16-year-old attendee Reggin’a Jefferies was killed in a shooting that shocked the city. Wilson had been standing right next to the girl, Harris said.
It was Pratt-Rose she was honoring on Sunday before Wilson herself became a victim while catching what she thought would be a routine BART ride home.
Cowell, raised on the downscale side of northern Concord, showed little of the sort of ambition that illuminated Wilson’s life.
His parents — Robin Cowell, 55, and Anne Cowell, 54 — filed for divorce in October 1992, one month after their son’s second birthday. In the years that followed, court records show that both Cowell and his parents had a galaxy of run-ins with law enforcement in Contra Costa County that were accompanied by jail stints.
In 1998, when his son
was 8, Robin Cowell was sentenced to 90 days in jail for residential burglary. A year later, he was arrested for drug possession, and three months later, he got hauled in for grand theft, possession of stolen property and possession of a firearm by a felon. Prosecutors combined the charges, and he drew 210 days in jail. His rap sheet continued to grow in the years that followed.
Anne Cowell, meanwhile, has been in and out of North Bay mental hospitals over the years. She was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and borderline personality disorder, records show. She is currently serving a three-year sentence in Sonoma County Jail for arson, her second such crime in four years.
Both parents declined to comment.
Friends and family described the couple’s son as troubled for as long as they could remember. The family issued a statement after Wilson’s death expressing sympathy for the slain woman and asserting that John Cowell suffered “from mental illness most of his life,” being bipolar and schizophrenic.
“As bad as it is, I’m not fully surprised that this (the killing) happened,” said Robert, a classmate of Cowell’s at Glenbrook Middle School and Mount Diablo High School, both in Concord. “Nobody I know is necessarily shocked. He was always in trouble, in fights. It was crazy. He was an angry, violent person.”
Robert, who didn’t want his full name used because of the volatility of the situation around the killing, said Cowell “was smoking methamphetamine and shooting heroin in sixth and seventh grade. It was crazy. Then when he was older, he wore a grill, thought he was really ... hood.”
Cowell has a tattoo reading, “North Concord,” a sign of affiliation with his rough-andtumble neighborhood, and on his now-deleted Facebook page he posted what appeared to be barely coherent rap rhymes: “Talk guap dollas rolled n knots, Holdin in smoke nose full up wit raw, Solid as a rock concrete off tops ...”
According to court files, John Cowell started his brushes with the law at age 14, when he was arrested for vandalism and released to a parent or guardian. What followed were more than a dozen arrests as a juvenile, with charges ranging from robbery to battery with gang enhancements.
As an adult, he was arrested dozens of times in Concord, Pleasant Hill and Martinez, and his long rap sheet includes jail stints for methamphetamine use and assault, plus restraining orders filed against him. Authorities revoked his probation on numerous occasions, indicating he had not been out of jail for more than a few months at a time since he was a teenager.
Many on social media, and some in Wilson’s family, assumed the Sunday attack was racially motivated. But friends who knew Cowell in his younger years said they didn’t see him exhibit racist behavior. Robert Goans, who was close to Cowell in junior high and high school, said a small army of former friends have challenged the racism narrative on social media. He and others said Cowell’s circle included friends of all races, and that Cowell dug rap culture.
“He was kind of a rapper, they shot a bunch of videos,” Goans said. “All of our other rapper friends were black, too.”
Jameel, a friend who also asked to be identified only by his first name, said he never experienced racism from Cowell in the 15 years they knew each other. Jameel, who is black, recalled spending nights at each other’s houses, shooting rap videos. The two have matching tattoos behind their ears.
Before the drugs took hold, Cowell was a normal skater kid who spent time outdoors in the skate park, and indoors on the Xbox in his trailer, Goans said. When very young, he was a funny outcast and had a way of making
people feel comfortable around him, he said. That soured.
Jameel said he hadn’t spoken to his ex-friend in years, but spotted a familiar tattoo at the North Concord station a few weeks ago. It was Cowell.
“I just kept walking,” Jameel said. “He didn’t look too good, and I didn’t have much to say to him.”
There was no obvious indication of erratic behavior in the moments leading up to Wilson’s death on the BART platform.
BART Police Chief Carlos Rojas said the transit system’s recently enhanced video network captured every moment of the attack and the aftermath. When Nia and Lahtifa Wilson boarded their earlier BART train at Concord Station, Cowell was on the same car, Rojas said.
“From looking at the tape, it seems he showed no outward emotion ... from there to MacArthur, and there was no contact between him and the sisters,” he said. It was only while the pair were walking toward the door of the Warm Springs-bound train they transferred to — a third sister had already boarded — that Cowell attacked, Rojas said.
“It was like a prison-yard assault,” he said. “Almost not even stopping to do the stabbing motion. Very quick, from behind.” The assailant jabbed into the side of both women’s necks, holding the knife in his right hand, and then stood for a moment to take in the sight before running away.
Two veteran BART police officers were downstairs, heard screaming and dashed upstairs, but the attacker was already gone. One of the officers put a compress onto Nia Wilson’s neck, but it was too late. Lahtifa Wilson was hospitalized and is expected to fully recover.
What followed was a 21hour manhunt that may not have ended so quickly if not for the video footage, the chief said.
BART police investigators zeroed in on the attack images, then traced the suspect during his entire route. They watched as he dashed downstairs into the station’s parking garage to ditch his backpack and a sweatshirt. Through this, police were able to not only capture high-quality images of Cowell’s face, but swiftly confirm the abandoned backpack was his.
BART Community Service Officer Aliyyah Shaw crunched the voluminous video footage, tracking the suspect camera to camera, angle by angle, to assemble the narrative before, during and after the attack for detectives.
“It was like a puzzle, and I had about five different cameras I depended on for this,” she said. “In all the commotion, people were thinking, ‘Wait, is this the guy, or is that the guy, no maybe not.’ I knew we had to work fast.”
BART soon widely distributed pictures of Cowell to the public, and more than 50 officers from various law enforcement agencies began screening dozens of phoned-in tips. The next day at 6:27 p.m., after being spotted twice by passengers who tipped off the cops, Cowell was arrested at the Pleasant Hill BART Station.
Police and prosecutors are still trying to figure out why Cowell allegedly unleashed such brutal violence on two apparent strangers, and they said they’re not ruling anything out. The motive continues to baffle everyone else involved in the case, too, from Cowell’s family to Wilson’s. But the one man who could fill in some blanks on what happened and why last Sunday isn’t offering up anything.
Cowell made his first appearance in Alameda County Superior Court on Wednesday and entered no plea. His lawyer said he won’t be commenting.