One child, age 1, shot and killed inside a car over a reported box of diapers. That is the input Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s office started from, and on Monday, four months after 1-year-old Kohen Kartier Wiley died in his mother’s arms outside a Walmart in Senatobia, the office announced its output: the officer’s use of force was ‘justified,’ to Capital B. Fitch gave no reasoning for the decision and did not say what evidence the review considered. The body-camera footage from the shooting remains unreleased — unseen by the family, unseen by the public.
The family’s attorneys, led by civil rights lawyer Ben Crump, answered with the obvious measurement problem: the state reached a conclusion while withholding the one recording that would let anyone check the work.
How can anyone accept that conclusion when Kohen’s family and the public still have not been allowed to see the body-camera footage?
Crump said Monday. “If the footage supports the state’s decision, release it. We will not stop fighting until this family gets the truth.”
The state’s account
The official narrative comes from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, which took over the case on June 14, the day of the shooting. In its statement that day, the MBI said officers from the Senatobia Police Department and the Tate County Sheriff’s Office were answering a shoplifting call when they “encountered two subjects and a juvenile child fleeing from the store into a vehicle,” Reason’s Josh Pauzé reported. The officers “attempted to stop the vehicle, but the driver drove in the direction of the officers, almost striking one,” the statement said, and an officer then “discharged their weapon and the vehicle fled the scene.” The family drove to a local hospital, where Kohen was pronounced dead.
Every element of that sentence carries the justification: the car drove toward the officer. If the officer stood in the vehicle’s path, the shooting reads as self-defense. If he did not, it reads as something else, which is why the trajectory of the bullets matters.
The family’s account and the bullet enter points
Vellesiya Wiley, Kohen’s mother, gave a version incompatible with the MBI’s in a video posted on X after the shooting. She said police tried to stop her friend, the driver, and that she considered the encounter to have “nothing to do” with her; she walked to her own car carrying Kohen, her friend got in and began backing out, and officers approached with guns drawn. Wiley said she lifted Kohen up so the officers could see the child, and they opened fire: “[The police] tried to say that [my friend] forcefully was trying to drive and hit them, but they was all on the right side, and she was driving towards the left….They personally just shot at the car,”
The family’s attorneys say forensic evidence backs the mother’s geometry over the state’s. An independent autopsy performed by forensic pathologist Robert Mitchell indicates the bullets entered through the front passenger door rather than the windshield, according to Mississippi Today’s reporting cited by Crump — a result consistent with an officer standing alongside the car, not in front of it. That is an allegation of expert analysis, not a court finding; no publicly released report from the state has addressed it, because no state account of the evidence has been publicly released at all.
Wiley was riding in the passenger seat holding Kohen when the officer shot, family members told WREG; the aunt driving was left in critical condition. One witness told the station she watched the car pull away with officers chasing on foot just before the gunshots. At a press conference at Gospel Temple Church of God in Christ in Senatobia eight days later, Wiley described the interval the numbers can’t: “I watched my baby take his first breath, and I watched my baby take his last breath.”
A misdemeanor and a box of diapers
The underlying alleged offense was shoplifting — by the witness account WREG gathered, two women leaving the store, one carrying a single box of diapers, one carrying Kohen. Family members deny any shoplifting happened at all. Under Mississippi law, shoplifting is a misdemeanor, and as Reason’s Joe Lancaster wrote in June, a misdemeanor does not authorize lethal force. The constitutional rule, set by the Supreme Court’s 1985 Tennessee v. Garner decision, is similar across the country: police may not use deadly force against a fleeing suspect unless the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious injury. The MBI’s “almost striking one” is the state’s attempt to place this case inside that exception; the unreleased footage is where that placement would be tested.
The department’s record
The Senatobia Police Department’s standing to be taken at its word is weak on paper. Crump laid out the record Monday: “This is a department whose chief was fired after reports of racial slurs in his text messages, and whose officer faced a complaint alleging a racially offensive remark two days before he shot Kohen.”
The chief was Harold Vanderford. After Mississippi Today, The New York Times and Verite News reported on his messages — in one, per Verite News, he said he “almost beat a nigger and white woman’s ass a few minutes ago” — he attempted to resign. On Sept. 1 the Senatobia Board of Aldermen rejected the resignation and voted unanimously to fire him instead.
The June 12 complaint came from Officer Dexter Smith against Sergeant Hunter Foster, named in the reporting as the officer who shot Kohen two days later. Smith’s complaint states he was doing paperwork in the booking room when he heard Foster say to colleagues, “Who is this Black motherfucker back there?” Smith said he had almost no prior relationship with Foster. Another internal complaint alleged a racially offensive remark by the officer toward a Black officer, Mississippi Today reported. The officer was placed on administrative leave after the shooting and the Senatobia department issued a statement promising eventual transparency; it has since declined to release the footage, calling that standard procedure during an ongoing investigation. The investigation is no longer ongoing. The footage is still not out.
What holds the story together is a department that investigated itself, through a state bureau, and cleared itself, while sitting on the recording. Kohen’s great-grandmother Carolyn Stokes told WREG: “Senatobia Police Department get away with too much stuff. I hear about it all the time. It’s in the news all the time. Y’all probably down here all the time, recording this stuff, but it’s just too much.”
The next number to watch isn’t a number: it’s the footage itself, and whether it shows a car driving at an officer or bullets going through a passenger door.