On Easter Sunday, April 17, 2022, Kayla Cooper, a 22-year-old Black woman, was found fatally shot inside a home on Harrison Street in Wiggins, Mississippi. A family member discovered her unresponsive in a bedroom shortly after 1 a.m.; responding medics pronounced her dead at the scene and the coroner indicated a likely single gunshot wound as an autopsy was ordered.

Kayla was born in 1999 in Albany, Georgia, and raised in Stone County, where she graduated from Stone High School in 2018 and later attended Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College’s Perkinston campus. Friends and relatives remembered her as compassionate, soft-spoken and devoted to her Baptist faith and family. She was a mother of three toddlers, including twins, and fundraising pages set up after her death described efforts to provide for her children and cover funeral costs.

Local police quickly identified and publicly named 23-year-old Zavago Oryan Wilson as a suspect and issued an alert; he surrendered to law enforcement later that morning and was taken into custody without incident. Investigators focused on reconstructing the hours before the 1:11 a.m. emergency call.

Did anyone in Wiggins know Kayla or have information about what happened that night?