On Monday, the office of the Mississippi attorney general, Lynn Fitch, announced that the police shooting of Kohen Wiley, a one-year-old, as he sat in his mother’s lap “was justified”. The statement came four months after the baby was killed in Senatobia, Mississippi. On 14 June, officers in Senatobia, a small city near Memphis, were responding to a shoplifting call alleging Vellesiya Wiley, the baby’s mother, and Latoya Ferrell, a friend, had stolen a pack of diapers.
Neither woman has been charged with a crime. Officials have not released any evidence of shoplifting. According to police reports, on the day of the shooting, the women and child exited the store, entered their vehicle and began to leave the parking lot when officers arrived.
The police drew their weapons. Wiley lifted the baby up to indicate that there was a child in the car. An officer, identified by other records as Sgt Hunter Foster, fired into the vehicle, killing Kohen Wiley and wounding Ferrell.
Foster is white; both Wileys and Ferrell are Black. The Mississippi bureau of investigation, which investigated the shooting, alleged that the driver “drove in the direction of the officers, almost striking one”. But the civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is representing the family, released an independent autopsy that indicated Wiley was shot from the side of the car, not the front, which contradicted officers’ statements that Ferrell headed towards them.
It is not yet clear if or when law enforcement officials will release footage from the incident. The shooting was just the most recent in a series of incidents involving Senatobia’s police force. The town is about 40% Black.
In September, Senatobia fired its police chief, who reportedly used racial slurs. And in 2023, the town made national news after an officer arrested and placed in a cell a 10-year-old Black boy who had urinated in public. That child was later sentenced to three months’ probation.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
