Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s office will not prosecute the Senatobia police sergeant who fired into a car and killed 1-year-old Kohen Wiley outside a Walmart in June. The office announced Monday that it “found the use of force was justified” and will close the case.
Kohen was shot on June 14 while in his mother’s lap. Officers had been called about an alleged shoplifting of diapers. The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, which led the inquiry, said the driver “drove in the direction of the officers, almost striking one.” The officer, Sgt. Hunter Foster, has not been charged. Neither Kohen’s mother, Vellesiya Wiley, nor Latoya Ferrell, who was also in the car and was wounded, has been charged with a crime, and no evidence of shoplifting has been made public.
The family’s account is different. Ms. Wiley has said she held her son up so officers could see a child was in the car. An independent autopsy the family commissioned suggested Kohen was hit from the side of the vehicle, not the front, which would cut against the claim that the car was headed at the officers.
“A 1-year-old baby was shot and killed by a police officer, and now the state of Mississippi says that use of force was justified,” said Ben Crump, the family’s attorney. “How can anyone accept that conclusion when Kohen’s family and the public still have not been allowed to see the body-camera footage?”
Foster’s lawyer, Martin Zummach, said his client “had no choice but to fire his weapon.”
John P. Gross, a use-of-force expert, said of the shooting: “This shooting was almost certainly unjustified.”
Footage surfaces before the family sees it
On Wednesday, Darkhorse Press published what it said were three police body-camera videos and two Walmart surveillance recordings, two days after the attorney general’s announcement. As that outlet reported, the footage shows store security speaking with Ms. Wiley and another woman, both of them then running to the car with officers behind them, weapons drawn. It also shows the car backing into a parked vehicle. The state has not said how the material reached the press.
The public record on the key question, what Foster could see when he fired, is still thin. The attorney general’s office has not released its findings in full, and the footage that has circulated is not the complete set. The Mississippi Department of Public Safety has said it would meet the Wiley family before releasing materials itself. Crump and attorney Van Turner were scheduled to review footage with the family Thursday.
Patrick Lumumba of the Senatobia Committee for Accountability and Transparency has pushed for the release since the summer.
For Black residents of Tate County and across Mississippi, the ruling sets a plain standard: a police officer can shoot into a car carrying a baby over a reported theft of diapers, and the state’s review can end without a grand jury hearing the evidence. The attorney general’s office said investigators found too little evidence of criminal conduct to present the case to one.
The family has not said whether it will file a civil suit. Crump has demanded the complete body-camera and surveillance footage from authorities and from Walmart.
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