Mississippi police kill 1-year-old Kohen Wiley during response to suspected shoplifting report

On Sunday 14 June, a Mississippi police officer shot and killed Kohen Kartier Wiley, a 1-year-old Black child, whilst responding from a shoplifting call at a Walmart in Senatobia. Since Tuesday evening, protesters have gathered outside both the store and Senatobia’s city hall, facing down police using tear gas to suppress them.

Kohen’s mother, Vellesiya Wiley, reportedly left the store with her baby and a friend. All three got into a car together to drive away. However, an officer responding to a suspected theft of a box of diapers opened fire on the car before it could leave the scene.

Mississippi police had seen the child before shooting

The Mississippi Department of Public Safety (MDPS) released a statement claiming that:

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. 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.

If this story sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same narrative given by US immigration agents after they murdered Renee Nicole Good back in January. In that case, it was later proven to be a downright lie. Likewise, witnesses in Senatobia have also contradicted the officers’ claims.

Note, also, that the statement acknowledges that the officers saw that the 1-year-old Kohen was inside the car. They opened fire in spite of knowing that there was a baby in the vehicle.

On Wednesday, Vellesiya appeared in a video to give her account on social media. She also stressed that she made it clear her baby was in the car:

It was me, my son and another friend of mine was at Walmart. As we was leaving out the Walmart they tried to stop her, but I kept walking because it had nothing to do with me.

By the time me and my baby got in the car, she came, and we was backing up and they was running at the car. I raised my baby up because they was drawing their gun […] to show them that he was in the car.

So she was backing up and she hit a car as I was opening the door so the door flew back in. By the time I sat my baby back down there was like three or four shots. One of the shots hit him in his ribcage, and the other shots hit her in her arm and her thigh.

Vellesiya was not driving. She was in another seat, holding her baby. Even if the officers genuinely thought that shooting the driver was a necessary act, they were negligent enough (or far enough away) to hit the 1-year-old, of whom they had been made fully aware.

Unreleased footage

By Tuesday night, Kohen’s family had obtained representation from civil rights attorney Ben Crump. Crump issued a statement:

A one-year-old child is dead because police officers in Mississippi opened fire on a car in a crowded Walmart parking lot.

Kohen Wiley was a baby. His mother, who has not been charged with any crime, says she was trying to communicate to officers that there was a baby in the car. They fired anyway, leading to the death of an innocent one-year-old. We intend to seek justice for baby Kohen and the life that was stolen from him.

Video footage caught on a bystander’s mobile phone shows a car driving away from the police. However, it doesn’t show the moment when the shots were fired. Multiple bullet holes can be seen clearly in a photo of the car taken after the incident.

Meanwhile, MDPS commissioner Sean Tindell announced that he would not release the officers’ body camera footage until the completion of an independent investigation. The mayor and the Senatobia Board of Aldermen have placed one officer on leave over the shooting.

Kohen’s family has demanded the immediate release of both the Walmart surveillance footage and the bodycam videos.

Protests and repression

Around 40% of Sentobia’s 8,500 residents are Black. It has a crime rate well below the US average, and one of the lowest in its state. However, repressive policing in the area has reportedly caused public resentment towards law enforcement to rise in recent years.

On Tuesday, that repressive policing played out in real time. Protesters had massed in the Walmart parking lot to express their anger and anguish at the police violence which caused Kohen’s death. In response, law enforcement officers wearing gas masks fired tear gas into the crowd, forcing them to scatter.

Meanwhile, some 200 demonstrators gathered outside Senatobia’s City Hall . Across the street, police snipers watched them from vantage points on shop roofs.

The protesters yelled their fury at the police, shouting “No Justice, No Peace”. One man, Leon White, raised a sign reading “The People Demand: End to Police Terror”. He told reporters from the Mississippi Free Press that tension between the community and the police:

has been a problem that has been building for a long time.

For many years, the police force was fine, but in recent years—I don’t know why—it’s become a big problem.

Featured image via the Canary