The verdict turned on prosecutors’ account of planning, travel, concealment and a parking lot attack.
EL CAJON, Calif. — A jury’s finding that Kandynn Wilson lay in wait before killing his estranged wife led to a life-without-parole sentence in a San Diego County case rooted in planning, travel and concealment.
Wilson, 34, was sentenced May 27 to life in prison without parole plus one year for the killing of Ericka J. Wilson, 29. Jurors convicted him in December of first-degree murder and found true a lying-in-wait special circumstance. They also found that he used a knife. The sentence means Wilson has no parole eligibility for the January 2022 killing, which prosecutors said happened after he drove from Oakland to Spring Valley and waited for Ericka Wilson outside her apartment.
The legal finding centered on what prosecutors said Wilson did before the stabbing. He took a vacation day from work, drove hundreds of miles south and first went to a workplace linked to Ericka Wilson, according to the district attorney’s office. Prosecutors said he waited for her to get off work so he could attack her in a parking lot. When he realized he had gone to the wrong location, he drove to her apartment complex on Canyon Drive, parked and reclined his seat while waiting for her to return.
The attack took place close to midnight on Jan. 27, 2022, in the 1600 block of Canyon Drive in Spring Valley. Authorities said Ericka Wilson pulled into the parking area and began to get out of her vehicle. Wilson approached wearing a ski mask, grabbed her and stabbed her 23 times in the neck, prosecutors said. The public record says she called 911 during the attack while trying to escape. Deputies were dispatched at about 11:55 p.m. for a report of a woman calling for help.
Deputies found Ericka Wilson unresponsive in the parking lot with obvious traumatic injuries, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department said in its first release. Deputies and firefighters performed lifesaving measures, but she was pronounced dead at the scene. The Sheriff’s Homicide Unit responded and took over the investigation. Early that next day, the department said investigators had identified Kandynn Taylor Wilson as the suspect, located him a few blocks away and booked him into the San Diego Central Jail on a murder count.
Prosecutors later filled in details that helped the jury weigh premeditation and lying in wait. Ericka Wilson worked at two Ross stores in the area, one in Spring Valley and one in Santee, and Wilson went to locations tied to her work that night, according to court accounts. The sentencing record said he had planned the killing for months, first trying to buy a gun and later requesting vacation time that covered the date of the attack. Those facts became part of the state’s argument that the killing was arranged before Wilson reached the parking lot.
The case also included evidence from the scene and the hours after the attack. Prosecutors said Wilson wore a mask and gloves. A neighbor saw the stabbing and chased him with a bat, forcing him to flee on foot and leave behind his vehicle, gloves and the murder weapon. Other neighbors kept him from driving away, according to court accounts. He was arrested about four hours later at a 7-Eleven a short distance from the complex. Prosecutors said he had Ericka Wilson’s blood on his hands and clothing when he was found.
District Attorney Summer Stephan described the killing as an act of domestic violence and said the verdict was just. “I hope today’s sentencing brings a measure of justice to the heartbreaking loss of the victim’s family,” Stephan said in announcing the sentence. The Wilsons had been married for six years and had a child together before separating. Later reporting on the prosecution’s sentencing brief said the marriage had included multiple domestic violence incidents and that the couple had been separated for about two years before Ericka Wilson was killed.
The sentence imposed after the December verdict reflected both the murder conviction and the special findings. First-degree murder by itself can carry severe punishment, but the lying-in-wait special circumstance placed the case among the most serious forms of homicide under California law. The added one-year term was tied to the knife-use allegation. Deputy District Attorney Alexandra Lorens prosecuted the case. The district attorney’s office said the jury, law enforcement and prosecution team were central to bringing the case from the 2022 emergency response to the 2026 sentencing.
Outside the legal findings, the official account left some details unresolved in public. Authorities have not released a full narrative of what was said between Wilson and Ericka Wilson at the parking lot, if anything. The public releases do not identify the neighbor who intervened or describe the child the Wilsons shared. They also do not provide a complete account of the earlier domestic violence incidents cited in the sentencing record. What is clear from the court result is that jurors accepted the prosecution’s account that Wilson planned, waited and attacked.
Stephan used the case to point to broader domestic violence harm in San Diego County. Her office said seven people were killed by a current or former intimate partner in 2024, with one additional person killed during a domestic violence-related incident. The office said that was an increase from five domestic violence-related homicides in the prior year, though the totals remained below the average from the previous two decades. Figures for 2025 were not yet available when the sentence was announced in late May.
Ericka Wilson was remembered in an online memorial message as smart, funny, hard working, determined and loyal. Prosecutors described her as the wife of six years and mother of Wilson’s child. The court record described her final moments in a parking lot after work, where deputies and firefighters tried to save her and could not. For her family, Stephan said, the sentence could bring only a measure of justice, not a return to what was lost.
For now, Wilson remains sentenced to life without parole plus one year. The May 27 hearing ended the trial court’s sentencing phase, leaving any future public action to the post-conviction process.
Author note: Last updated June 23, 2026.