Kohen Wiley: Mississippi Attorney General Says Use of Force Was Justified in Death of 1-Year-Old Child
Mississippi’s attorney general says a Senate police officer was justified in fatally shooting a 1-year-old boy in June while responding to a shoplifting call.
The conclusion of the state’s investigation into the shooting death of 1-year-old Kohen Wiley follows months of mourning and calls for justice, both nationally and in the small town about 40 miles south of Memphis, Tennessee, where the shooting took place.
The shooting occurred in mid-June as Senatobia officers responded to a shoplifting call at a local Walmart, where they saw Vellesiya Wiley, Kohen’s mother, carrying her son as she and a friend left the store, got into a car and began to drive away. Wiley and her friend are both black. Police reports indicate diapers and baby clothes were allegedly stolen.
According to a statement released shortly after the shooting by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, officers attempted to stop the vehicle, but the car drove toward law enforcement, prompting an officer to shoot at the car, striking Kohen and her mother’s friend.
In a video released days after the shooting, Vellesiya Wiley denied stealing anything from her or her friend and disputed that her friend, who was driving, drove toward the officers. Ben Crump, a nationally known civil rights attorney who represents Kohen’s family, said the results of an independent preliminary autopsy indicate that Kohen was shot from the side of the car, not the front, contradicting the officers’ claims that the car was heading toward them.
The shooting is the latest in a series of incidents that have eroded trust between Senatobia police and the city’s black citizens.
Last year, a Senate officer threatened a black woman with a Taser, pulling her from her car and knocking her to the ground and arresting her during a confrontation in a handicapped parking spot in the same Walmart parking lot where Kohen was shot. Two years earlier, a Senate police officer was fired for arresting a 10-year-old boy for urinating in public.
Most recently, former Senatobia Police Chief Harold Vanderford was fired by the city’s Board of Aldermen after reports in the New York Times, Mississippi Today and Verite News that he used racial slurs in private text messages.
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