Police arrest suspect in Oakland train station stabbing

A man who police say killed an 18-year-old woman in an unprovoked knife attack in a train station in the San Francisco Bay Area has been caught.

John Cowell, 27, a recently paroled robber with a violent history, was peacefully arrested on an Antioch-bound train Monday night about a dozen miles from the Oakland station where investigators believe he killed Nia Wilson and wounded her sister Sunday night.

"This is the first step to achieving justice for Nia and her family," Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) Police Chief Carlos Rojas said at a news conference.

In a "prison-style attack," Cowell stabbed Nia Wilson twice in the neck and then attacked her sister before fleeing and apparently removing his pants and sweatshirt to evade capture, Rojas said. The knife believed to have been used in the attack was found at a nearby construction site.

Nia Wilson

Letifah Wilson, 26, said that she, Nia Wilson, and a third sister had been returning from a family outing when they were "blindsided by a maniac."

"He didn't know us, we didn't know him," Wilson 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," she told ABC7 News on Monday, speaking outside a family member's home with a bandage on her neck.

The women's father, Ansar Muhammad, said one of his daughters called him, crying hysterically, and told him to get to the MacArthur station.

"It's nothing imaginable, seeing your child on the BART platform with a yellow tarp over her body," Muhammad said Monday evening. "That is an image I'll never forget for the rest of my life. So I want justice. All I want is justice."

Surveillance video on the train and at the station's platform showed Cowell had been riding the same car as the sisters Sunday, but they did not interact, Rojas said.

A motive for the attack remained unclear. Rojas said Cowell hasn't been connected to any radical or white supremacist groups, although he added: "We are going to explore all options and all possibilities."

The victims were black and Cowell is white.