SENATOBIA, MISSISSIPPI (The Daily Whatever Press)—Four months. That’s how long it took the state of Mississippi to look at a 1-year-old boy shot dead in his mother’s lap in a Walmart parking lot and decide, after careful consideration, that the bullet was “justified.”
On Monday, Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s office announced it had finished reviewing “a June 14, 2026 incident in Senatobia involving one officer,” found “the use of force was justified,” and cited Section 45-1-6 of the Mississippi Code. That was most of the statement. Kohen Wiley got an incident, an officer, and a statute number, which is shorter than the warning label on his car seat or crib mattress.
Here’s how that beautiful baby was murdered. On June 14, Senatobia police rolled up to a Walmart after receiving a call. The alleged crime? Shoplifting a pack of diapers.
The women—Kohen’s mom, Vellesiya Wiley, and Latoya Ferrell—came out with the baby, got in the car, and started to leave. Officers drew their guns. And Vellesiya did what every mother on earth would do: she held her son up so the men with the guns could see there was a baby in the car.
It’s the most universal “don’t shoot” sign a human body can make. Officer Hunter Foster fired into the car anyway and killed her son. In her arms. A piece of me died on Vellesiya Wiley’s behalf just typing this. I can’t even fathom enduring that anguish.
A bullet also hit Ferrell.
This is what the state of Mississippi just called “justified.” Fuck that, fuck every signature on it, and fuck every racist in this fucking country who didn’t give a fuck and thought the cop was “justified” in murdering that baby. FUCKING FUCK.
The story, courtesy of the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation on the day of the shooting, is that the driver drove toward officers and “almost” struck one. Almost. In July, the family’s attorneys, Ben Crump and Van Turner, released an independent autopsy finding the bullet came through the side of the car—and through the side of Kohen. A car bearing down on you shows you its grille, not its doors. You don’t need a forensics degree for that one; you need to have seen a car.
The autopsy ruled his death a homicide.
You know what would settle it? The goddamn video. The MBI says its five agents reviewed body-cam footage, dashcam footage, and Walmart’s overhead surveillance. Great. Show us. As of Monday, the Department of Public Safety had released none of it. Not one frame. A spokesperson says it’s coming “in short order,” a phrase that has been doing a hell of a lot of heavy lifting since June.
Every GenXer reading this remembers 1991. We were in dorm rooms and first apartments when George Holliday pointed his camcorder off a balcony and the whole country watched Rodney King get beaten on the evening news. That tape taught a generation that video proof is how you make America look. The lesson the institutions took from it was simpler: hang onto the tape.
So let’s talk about Hunter Foster, since the state seems so confident in him. Days before he shot Kohen, Foster was the subject of an internal complaint accusing him of making a racially offensive remark to a coworker. Two earlier misconduct accusations against him surfaced in court cases after the shooting; one was dismissed, and the other ended in a confidential settlement.
Kohen, his mother, and Ferrell are Black. Foster is white.
And his boss? Senatobia fired its police chief, Harold Vanderford, last month—after the New York Times, Mississippi Today, and Verite reported on text messages in which he repeatedly used racist slurs. That’s the man who was running the department when one of his officers fired into a car with a baby held up in the window.
Senatobia is a town of about 8,000 people, and its police department seems to have a Groundhog Day-like problem with racism. In 2023, a Senatobia officer was fired for arresting a Black 10-year-old for peeing in public. Last year, another officer threatened a Black woman with a Taser and pulled her out of her car over an accessible parking space—incidentally, in the same Walmart lot where Kohen died. Same lot. Same department. Same shit on repeat.
Which brings us back to Lynn Fitch, because I want her name stapled to this every single time it comes up. I already hate this woman with every fiber of my feminist killjoy being, because Fitch is the AG whose office took Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to the Supreme Court and killed Roe. She built a national brand on the sanctity of babies. She went to the highest court in the land to make sure Mississippi women would be forced to carry them.
And when a Mississippi baby was actually here—breathing, toddling, held up in his mother’s arms in a parking lot—her office wrote three sentences and cited a statute.
So here’s Mississippi’s pro-life policy, as written by its own attorney general: the state will fight you all the way to the Supreme Court to make you have the baby. It will not help you buy the diapers. And if a cop thinks you took the diapers, it will call the bullet “justified.”
Neither woman has been charged with a crime. Officials haven’t released any evidence that anything was stolen at all. No charges, no evidence, no video.
And now, no baby.
The Mississippi Legislative Black Caucus demanded answers in August. The family has been demanding them since June. Activists in Senatobia have been marching since the week it happened, and on Monday, Building Bridges Coalition president Marquell Bridges told the Mississippi Free Press that the blood is on the hands of everyone complicit in the cover-up, Fitch included. He’s right, and it doesn’t wash off with a statute number.
Public Enemy put out “911 Is a Joke” in 1990. Thirty-six years later it’s still not funny, and in Senatobia the punch line is a Walmart calling the cops over a pack of diapers.
Kohen Wiley was 1. His mother held him up so they would see him.
They saw him. They shot anyway.
Nothing on earth can justify that.
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This the same state where African Americans are hanging themselves. So not surprised that they killed a 1 year old baby. Completely senseless to kill innocent baby. Rest in Peace little Prince. 💔😢😞👎🏻
I hope the police officer who shot that baby sees that baby on his eyelids every time he attempts to sleep.