BART John Cowell
Ever since the news about a vicious stabbing attack that left Nia Wilson, 18, dead and her sister, Latifah, 21, also injured, people have been wondering if the attacks were hate crimes or racially motivated. Officials have named John Lee Cowell, a white man, as the suspect in the stabbings. Many tweets and posts on social media had announced that Cowell was a white supremacist, even before his name was released. Is this true? Here’s what we know so far.
Authorities are currently saying that they have found no evidence that John Cowell is a white supremacist, associated with hate groups, or that his attack was racially motivated. However, they are still investigating and are not ruling out the possibility.
There was no overt indication at the time that his horrific attack was racially motivated, according to witnesses and Latifah (sometimes spelled in some media sources as Letifah), Nia’s sister, who was also injured. She said that Nia stopped to help a woman with a stroller who was struggling to exit the train at the MacArthur station. At that moment, a man pulled out a knife and slashed her neck and stabbed her sister, CBS San Francisco reported.
#BART stabbing victim remembering her sister and recalling their final moments together
Latifah told ABC 7 that they never saw Cowell or exchanged any words with him before the stabbing. “All of a sudden we transfer, just to get blindsided by a maniac, for what I don’t know,” she 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.”
Witnesses also said the attack seemed to come out of nowhere. Authorities say Cowell was on the same train as the two women and followed them off the train, where he is suspected of quickly attacking them on the platform. Then he ran. He was found the next day, early in the evening.
BART Chief of Police Carlos Rojas said during a press conference on Monday that there was no evidence that the attack was racially motivated, but police weren’t ruling out the possibility either.
A number of tweets right after the event happened made it appear that the suspect was a known white supremacist in the community. However, this did not end up being the case, at least as far as we know at this point in time.
This is 18 y/o Nia Wilson. Tonight she was stabbed and killed in a random ambush attack by a suspected white supremacist male, who is still on the loose in Oakland Ca right now
In a press conference, Rojas said: “It looks like it was an unprovoked, unwarranted, vicious attack.” He described the attack as “prison style.” Rojas said that police have been searching for connections between Cowell and white supremacist groups, because the two women he attacked were black and Cowell is white, but they have not been able to find any connections.
Cowell did, however, have an extensive and violent criminal record. Court records showed that in May 2016 he was convicted of felony second-degree robbery, SFGate reported. Cowell had just been released on parole in May 2018, KRON 4 reported, after fulfilling his complete prison sentence. The conviction was connected to a May 2016 incident where Cowell showed a box cutter and replica handgun during an interaction with a loss prevention officer at Lucky’s in El Cerrito, East Bay Times reported.
A Kaiser hospital in Richmond had also obtained a restraining order against him in April 2016 because they said he repeatedly harassed and threatened staff members, including possibly threatening to kill a staff member. He was homeless and would sometimes show up at the emergency room and make threats, said Jason Curliano, an attorney who represents the hospital, to SFGate.
According to East Bay Times, Cowell was harassing a woman at a Kaiser hopsital and began swearing at her. He told a coworker that “she better not be friends with” the woman or she would be “shot in the face also,” court records said. She said he threatened her life every time he came to the department.
A different restraining order was also filed against him in 2015, possibly connected to entering a family’s home several times, without permission, while “high on drugs.” A search of court records also reveal a John Lee Cowell with 2016 bookings in Alameda County for misdemeanor infractions involving possession of a controlled substance, petty theft, and vandalism (malicious destruction of property.)
In 2013, he was convicted of battery in Walnut Creek.
A neighbor told East Bay Times that Cowell had once ordered food at Burger King, got angry at the clerk, and came back later and threw a brick through the window. She thought he would attack anyone he got angry at.
Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf said the following in a statement about whether or not the attack was racially motivated: “As the Mayor of Oakland, it’s important I acknowledge that this horrific crime has a context. Although investigators currently have no evidence to conclude that this tragedy was racially motivated or that the suspect was affiliated with any hate groups, 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.”
Rojas said that Cowell did not appear to be connected to any radical or white supremacist groups. But, “We are going to explore all options and all possibilities.”
We will update this story as more information about the suspect’s motives are available.