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OAKLAND — John Lee Cowell apparently said nothing before he slashed two sisters with a knife on a BART platform Sunday, killing 18-year-old Nia Wilson, according to police. His only words to detectives at headquarters following his arrest Monday were that he wanted a lawyer.
Although no hate motive has yet been linked to the stabbing as Cowell faces murder charges, Wilson’s uncle said Thursday he does not need the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office to tell him what he already knows: Cowell is white and his nieces are black.
“The racist motivation here is not a question for me,” Ansar El Muhammad said Thursday. “The whole world knows this was racially motivated.
That world includes many in the black community who feel their lives are in constant peril in a society still steeped in prejudice, to celebrities such as Anne Hathaway, who called out white privilege in a withering tweet, to other social media posts that unequivocally declare Cowell targeted the sisters because of their race.
“For a group of people who have such a history of being targeted, that’s the lens they view the world through,” said Phyllis Gerstenfeld, chairwoman of the criminal justice department at California State University, Stanislaus. “Many honestly feel that this was race motivated. … A lot of it is the history and the fact that relations with police aren’t that great. We’re also in a situation where feelings on this subject are so strong in general.”
Historically a hotbed for social and political activism, Oakland has a history that is also fraught with racial tension, from shootouts between the police department and the Black Panther Party to the killing of Oscar Grant, an unarmed black man, by a white BART police officer nine years ago.
Police shootings of unarmed African Americans have brought thousands to the streets in protests, particularly during the Black Lives Matter movement, a name coined by an Oakland activist.
A different kind of racial tension has arisen recently as well, and critics say it spans from Oakland to the White House. A neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va., last year left a left-wing counter protester dead, sparking outrage nationally when President Donald Trump did not condemn the rally.
In Oakland, it began in May when a white woman called police on a family of African Americans barbecuing in an area of Lake Merritt where coal burning wasn’t allowed. The next month, a man nicknamed Joe the Jogger threw a black homeless man’s belongings into the lake. In San Francisco, a white woman called authorities to complain an 8-year-old black girl was selling bottled water without a permit.
“It’s getting worse and worse every day,” said Kenzie Smith, who was barbecuing on the lake that day in May. “Now we have a death in our community. It’s unacceptable, and I find he did it out of hate.”
On Monday, people gathered at the MacArthur BART station for a vigil to mourn Nia Wilson, then about 1,000 marched to an Uptown bar where white nationalists were rumored to have scheduled a meet-up. Violence broke out briefly as the crowd attacked a white man believed to be a white nationalist, and officers were injured by fireworks.
On Thursday, the rage turned to KTVU, the Oakland-based news station that earlier this week had run an insensitive photo of Wilson. The picture purported to show her holding a gun, but friends have said it was a cell phone case shaped like a pistol.
Marching from downtown to the news station’s Jack London Square headquarters, protesters handed a list of six demands to KTVU reporter Paul Chambers, who met with members of the Wilson family outside KTVU and later interviewed Oakland community leader and rapper Mistah Fab. One of the demands called for termination of the people responsible for posting the picture of Nia Wilson.
Mistah Fab said the news outlet treated the victim as a suspect and ignored social media posts from Cowell. Critics said a Facebook page they say belonged to Cowell under a different name showed him wearing gold grills over his teeth.
“I checked his Facebook. They erased it now,” said Mistah Fab. He said Cowell was addicted to black culture and hip hop. “They don’t make him seem like a thug. Why don’t they post the videos of him dropping the N-Bomb?”
Mistah Fab, also known as Stanley Cox, later read a message KTVU news director Amber Eikel sent him. Eikel said one person was responsible for selecting the photo, which she called a “horrible” and “split-second” decision. Eikel apologized in the private message, Mistah Fab said.
Eikel did not respond to an email from this news organization seeking comment
Khafre Jay, founder and executive director of Hip Hop 4 Change, said the African-American community is often portrayed negatively, even if the person is a victim of a crime.
“I’m just angry,” he said. “They keep calling it a mistake. It’s not a mistake.”
Supporters calling for justice for Wilson also fear Cowell is already working on a mental illness criminal defense. His family told KRON-TV that he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
Gerstenfeld, who has conducted extensive research about hate crimes, said a mental illness diagnoses wouldn’t preclude Cowell — or anyone — from being convicted of a hate crime. She added hate crime cases are difficult to prove.
There were 1,093 hate crime events in California in 2017, an increase of 17.4 percent from 2016, according to a report from the state attorney general’s office. Of the 383 hate crimes that were referred for prosecution in 2017, 195 ultimately were filed as hate crimes and 76 as nonbias motivated crimes. Of the 124 cases that had available information for the report, only 65 were hate crime convictions. The rest were other convictions or non-convictions.
“It’s the only crime that really requires you to prove the motive,” Gerstenfeld said. “You have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they are motivated by the victims’ group.”
Staff writer Annie Sciacca contributed reporting.
