Mississippi residents, police at odds after 1-year-old shot dead by officers – National
The fatal shooting of a one-year-old baby boy in Mississippi this week has reignited longstanding tensions between police and Black residents in the small town of Senatobia after officers opened fire while responding to what local authorities describe as an alleged shoplifting incident.
“Law enforcement officers responded to a shoplifting call at Walmart on U.S. 51. Upon arrival, officers encountered two subjects and a juvenile child fleeing from the store into a vehicle. Officers attempted to stop the vehicle, but the driver drove in the direction of the officers, almost striking one,” police said.
“An officer then discharged their weapon, and the vehicle fled the scene. The subjects arrived at a local hospital, where one juvenile child in the vehicle was pronounced deceased, and another subject had critical injuries. No law enforcement officers received any serious physical injury.”
While the police release did not identify the child killed, the Associated Press reported, citing authorities, the child’s grandparents and a community advocate helping the family find legal representation, that the victim was a one-year-old boy called Kohen Wiley.
The Associated Press says the two adults with him were his mother and her friend.
The death of Wiley is the latest in a series of violent encounters with police that have outraged local community members in recent years. It has led to protests and calls for greater police accountability in the town of 8,000, including from well-known civil rights advocates.
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“We are treating items on a shelf as more valuable than a child,” Bernice King, the daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., said in a statement posted to Instagram on Wednesday. “That is not just bad policing; it is a moral collapse.”
The Senatobia Police Department said earlier this week in a Facebook statement that it was investigating an officer’s involvement in the shooting.
“We are committed to full transparency. As the investigation progresses and facts are verified, we will share as much information as possible,” the statement said.
The Guardian and ABC News reported on Friday that the officer in question — who has not been publicly named — has been put on leave.
Global News reached out to Senatobia police but could not independently verify this report.
Kohen’s mother and lawyer are calling for an investigation, along with a full release of all body camera and surveillance footage.
In a video posted on social media on Wednesday by civil rights attorney Ben Crump, urging a full investigation and release of all body camera and surveillance footage, Wiley said her friend was backing up the vehicle and hit a car, but was not driving toward the officers because they were “all on the right side and she was driving towards the left.”
She also said that before officers fired their weapons, she raised her baby up to alert them to the fact that there was a child in the car. Kohen was shot in his ribcage, she alleged.
Kohen’s mother also disputed the shoplifting allegation by police.
Marquell Bridges, the president and founder of an advocacy group called the Building Bridges Coalition, who has been helping the Wiley family, said Kohen’s death was “just the breaking point” after years of problematic interactions between Black residents and police.
Bridges pointed to an encounter last year in which an officer threatened Breshari Faulkner with a Taser, pulled her from her car onto the ground and arrested her during a confrontation over a handicapped parking space in the same Walmart lot where Kohen was shot.
In 2023, a Senatobia officer was fired for his role in arresting a 10-year-old Black boy who had urinated in a different parking lot. The boy’s family settled a federal lawsuit with the city earlier this year.
— with files from The Associated Press
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