Almost two years after Nia Wilson was stabbed to death on a train platform in Oakland, California, a judge last week sentenced the man convicted of her murder to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
To Wilson’s family, John Lee Cowell’s sentencing marks the end of a lengthy and high-profile trial. “It feels like all of this started yesterday, and at the same time it feels like the process took forever,” said Alicia Grayson, Wilson’s mother. “It’s been a long journey and having the verdict is bittersweet.”
Wilson was murdered on the night of 22 July 2018 while boarding a Bay Area Rapid Transit (Bart) train with her older sisters Letifah and Tashiya Wilson. Alameda prosecutors said in court that Cowell, then 27, had followed the three sisters on to a train half an hour before, and stabbed Nia and Letifah in their necks as the sisters prepared to transfer to a different train.
Cowell was arrested the following day at a different Bart station and later charged with Nia’s murder and the attempted murder of Letifah.
Cowell’s trial officially began in January 2020. Cowell pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, and his family and attorney insisted that the stabbing was the result of a mental health episode, citing a lengthy history of psychosis. A jury convicted him of the murder and attempted murder of the two Wilson sisters in March. Days into the jury’s deliberation an Oakland judge ruled Cowell was “sane” at the time of the murders, paving the way for the July sentencing.
Cowell’s public defender maintains that he is mentally incompetent.
Byron Brown, one of Wilson’s cousins, described Wilson as outspoken and outgoing: “Our families have known each other since before she was born. We grew up together and spent summers in the same house.” Nia was the youngest sibling, and she and Brown bonded by making music in his studio when she got older. “She was over here all the time. Now, she’s not here, and I’m used to seeing her all the time,” he said.
Brown described the court process as deeply traumatizing. “I’m relieved because we don’t have to wake up in the morning to go to court. Every time we went it felt like we were reliving the moment over again. But I’ll never really feel relief because she’s not here. She was young and we planned a whole lifetime. We expected her to grow up with all of us.”
Cowell’s sentencing comes amid a national reckoning over racial injustice and violence against Black Americans. As protests erupted across the country following the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, Wilson’s name was again pushed to the forefront of the longstanding conversation around violence against Black women.
Last week, the Oakland-based artist DeAndre Drake, who goes by Airballin, unveiled a casket featuring Wilson’s face amid about a dozen other portraits of Black Americans including Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor.
Seeing her daughter recognized nationally has been a humbling experience, said Wilson’s mother. She recalled seeing a young man pointing at her daughter’s image on Drake’s casket and asking: “Is that Breonna or Nia?”
“We told him who we were, and it was so humbling that Nia is a household name. It was like it could have been his sister, cousin or auntie,” Grayson said.
Cowell was never charged with a hate crime, but race was a central theme in the coverage of the murder and throughout the court proceedings. As news of Wilson’s murder became national news and images of Cowell circulated, so did speculation that Cowell was a white supremacist who killed Wilson out of hatred.
And her death again put the spotlight on the frequency with which Black women are murdered. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have found that Black women die of homicide at a rate almost higher than Hispanic, White and Asian women combined.
Still, Wilson’s mother says that Cowell’s conviction is a win in the long battle toward racial justice.
“Nia wasn’t killed by the police, but people still say her name,” Grayson said of the recent resurgence in attention to her daughter’s case.
“It’s a blessing and curse,” she continued. “No one wants their child immortalized like this, but the blessing is that they’ll never forget about her.”