On Easter Sunday, April 17, 2022, the quiet of Wiggins, Mississippi, was broken by the discovery of Kayla Cooper, a 22-year-old Black woman, fatally shot inside a modest home on Harrison Street. A family member found her unresponsive in a bedroom shortly after 1 a.m. and called for help. Responding officers and medics could do nothing; she was pronounced dead at the scene, with the county coroner indicating that she had likely been killed by a single gunshot wound as an autopsy was ordered to
confirm the cause of death.
Before that night, Kayla’s life had been rooted in family, faith and plans for the future. Born in 1999 in Albany, Georgia, she was raised in Stone County, Mississippi, where she attended local schools and graduated from Stone High School in 2018. She continued her education at Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College’s Perkinston campus, while the people around her remembered her as compassionate and soft-spoken, someone whose kindness and warmth drew others in. Her obituary described a young woman grounded in the Baptist faith, devoted to the people she loved and determined to build a better life for her children.
Those children were at the center of everything she did. Friends and relatives recalled how she juggled school, work and motherhood, caring for three toddlers, including twins, all between one and two years old. Crowdfunding pages created in the days after her death spoke of a “young life; gone too soon” and asked for help giving her a proper funeral and providing for the small children she left behind. Photographs shared publicly show her smiling widely on a couch with all three of them in her lap, an image that became emblematic of the loss felt across Wiggins when news of her killing spread.
In the first hours after her body was found, local police announced that they were investigating the death of a 22-year-old woman and soon identified a suspect: 23-year-old Zavago Oryan Wilson. A public alert stated that he was wanted for murder and urged anyone with information on his whereabouts to contact authorities, warning that he should be considered dangerous. As more details emerged, news reports described Wilson as Kayla’s boyfriend or ex-boyfriend and the father of her children, emphasizing the intimate nature of the violence that had taken her life.
The manhunt did not last long. By late Sunday morning on the day of the killing, Wilson surrendered himself to law enforcement. Local coverage reported that he turned himself in after being publicly named as the suspect in Kayla’s death, and he was taken into custody without incident. Police officials said he was wanted on a murder charge, and early accounts noted that investigators believed Kayla had been shot inside the home where she was found, with the investigation focused on reconstructing what had happened in the hours leading up to the 1:11 a.m. emergency call.
Over time, the case moved from headlines to the courts. Public records of the state’s corrections system show that by January 13, 2025, Wilson had been convicted in Stone County of second-degree murder and sentenced to 23 years in state prison. His sentence is recorded as running into the mid-2040s, reflecting a long period of incarceration for the killing, and his status is listed as an inmate in the Mississippi Department of Corrections system. Those records confirm that the initial arrest for Kayla’s homicide ultimately led to a serious felony conviction and a lengthy prison term.
For Kayla’s family, the legal outcome could not undo the abrupt absence at the center of their lives. The fundraiser created on behalf of her mother, Alice Johnson, described the struggle to cover funeral expenses and to provide stability for three children who would now grow up without their mother. Obituaries and memorial pages remember her as “beautiful and caring,” someone whose smile lit up rooms and whose greatest joy was her role as a mother. In Wiggins, her name joined those of other local victims on gun-violence memorials, a reminder of a young woman whose life story was cut short in a moment of domestic terror, leaving a grieving family and three small children to carry her memory forward.
