Sister recounts seeing Wilson bleeding from fatal stabbing

OAKLAND >> Tashiya Wilson was about to sit down on the BART train to go home when she saw her little sister, Nia Wilson, holding her bleeding neck.

“I knew something was wrong,” she said Monday on the witness stand in the trial against John Cowell, who stabbed her to death.

“I was about to sit down… I just seen blood on her hands,” Tashiya Wilson said, breaking down into sobs.

Tashiya, younger sister Nia and older sister Letifah were on their way home to Oakland on July 22, 2018 at the MacArthur BART station. They had just attended a family get together in Martinez, after learning that an aunt had stage four lung cancer.

Monday marked the third day of the jury trial for defendant John Cowell, who is accused of killing Nia Wilson and attempting to kill her older sister, Letifah Wilson. The defense does not dispute that Cowell killed Nia Wilson, but contends he did on a “rash impulse” stemming from his mental illness of schizophrenia.

Nia, 18, didn’t like riding BART. “She thought it was nasty” and full f germs, her sister said. But they needed a way to get home, and after not being able to find a ride, BART was their only option.

As they transferred at the MacArthur station around 9:26 p.m. that night to another train headed to 12th

Street Oakland, Tayisha was a step ahead of her sisters. The other two, as corroborated in a video surveillance of the attack, were at the threshold of the train door, waiting for a woman with a baby stroller to get off. It was then that Cowell came up to them from behind, a knife in his hand, and stabbed Nia in the neck twice and Letifah at least once, barely missing the second time.

Tashiya saw her little sister trip as she got onto the train, then she saw all the blood. Nia Wilson screamed out “Letifah.”

“I was in shock. I was trying to figure out what happened,” she said.

Tayisha began screaming, then did the only thing she could think of — she called her dad.

She told their father that Nia had just been stabbed and for him to come to the MacArthur station. In the chaos, he kept asking what happened and Tayisha yelled at him to get down there as fast as he could.