Two days after 1-year-old Kohen Wiley was shot and killed by police outside a Walmart in Senatobia, Mississippi, hundreds of protesters marched through the small city demanding answers. When the demonstration reached the same store where the fatal encounter began, law enforcement deployed tear gas.
The death of Kohen, who was inside a vehicle with his mother and a family friend, has become a flashpoint in Tate County and across Mississippi. Officials say officers were responding to a shoplifting call Sunday afternoon when they encountered two adults and a child getting into a vehicle. Kohen’s mother, represented by civil rights attorney Ben Crump, says she tried to show police that a baby was inside the car before officers opened fire.
The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation said officers with the Senatobia Police Department and Tate County Sheriff’s Office responded to the Walmart after an alleged shoplifting call. According to investigators, officers attempted to stop the vehicle, but the driver drove in the direction of officers and nearly struck one of them. MBI said an officer then fired his weapon and the vehicle left the scene.
The vehicle later arrived at a local hospital, where Kohen was pronounced dead. Another person inside the vehicle suffered critical injuries. Investigators said no law enforcement officers were seriously hurt.
The officer involved has been placed on administrative leave, according to Senatobia officials, but authorities have not publicly released the officer’s name. MBI is investigating the shooting and will turn its findings over to the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office when the investigation is complete.
Police body camera video and other possible evidence will not be released until after the independent state investigation is finished and presented to the attorney general’s office for potential criminal charges, state Public Safety Commissioner Sean Tindell said at a Tuesday news conference. He did not give a timeline and declined to discuss other details of the shooting.
For Kohen’s family and many Senatobia residents, that leaves urgent questions unanswered: why officers fired into a vehicle in a crowded Walmart parking lot, whether they knew a baby was inside, how many shots were fired, and what store surveillance, body camera footage, and self-checkout video may show.
Crump, who has represented the families of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Trayvon Martin, said Kohen was in the vehicle with his mother and a family friend. He said the friend had been shopping for diapers and was accused of stealing them, leading to the police call.
In a video posted Wednesday, Crump spoke with the child’s mother, identified in the source material as Vallesiya Wiley and Vellesiya Wiley. Wiley said they had gone to Walmart for diapers. She said her friend was stopped while they were leaving the store, but she continued walking with her baby because she was not involved.
“I kept walking because it had nothing to do with me,” Wiley said.
Wiley said that by the time she and Kohen got into the car, her friend came to the vehicle. As they began to back out, she said, police approached with guns drawn. Wiley said she tried to alert officers that her baby was inside the car.
“I raised my baby up trying to show them that he was in the car,” she said.
Then, Wiley said, officers fired.
“By the time I set my baby down, it was like three to four shots,” she said. “One of the shots hit him in his rib cage and the other shots hit her in her arm and her thigh.”
Wiley disputed the official claim that the driver was trying to hit officers.
“They tried to say that she forcefully was trying to drive and hit them, but they were all on the right side and she was driving toward the left,” she said. “They purposely just shot into the car.”
Wiley said no shoplifting occurred and that self-checkout cameras would show they purchased the diapers. She has not been charged with a crime, according to Crump.
“A one-year-old child is dead because police officers in Mississippi opened fire on a car in a crowded Walmart parking lot,” Crump said.
“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.”
The shooting also raises basic questions about police tactics. Geoffrey Alpert, a policing expert and criminology professor at the University of South Carolina, told NBC News that law enforcement officers are generally trained not to shoot in front of moving vehicles and to avoid injury by stepping out of their path.
“A bullet is not going to stop the car,” Alpert said. “And if you shoot the driver, then you have an unguided missile.”
Alpert also said the possible presence of a child in the vehicle made the shooting especially troubling.
“You don’t want to take the chance of hitting an innocent bystander,” he said. “That’s what makes it so horrific is the presence of this child.”
The anger that brought hundreds into the streets Tuesday was not limited to the shooting itself. Protesters marched through downtown Senatobia and gathered outside the Walmart on U.S. 51, where the incident began. The store temporarily closed as crowds grew. Videos shared online showed law enforcement officers lined up outside the entrance wearing respirators while tear gas was deployed.
Community activist Marquell Bridges, who helped organize the protest, said demonstrators were nonviolent.
“The only violence came from the police department when they decided to tear-gas peaceful protesters,” Bridges said.
“This is definitely about Kohen, but it’s not just about Kohen,” Bridges added. “It’s about a long history of overpolicing, racism and brutalization that the people have been suffering, and the people are saying we’re not going to take it anymore.”
That broader distrust has been echoed by residents who say Senatobia police have escalated encounters with the public in recent years. Senatobia, a town of about 8,500 people roughly 40 miles south of Memphis, Tennessee, has previously drawn national attention for policing involving children. Three years ago, officers arrested a 10-year-old boy for urinating next to his mother’s car while she was in an attorney’s office. The child was initially sentenced to probation and required to write a two-page report about Kobe Bryant before the case was dismissed.
Breshari Faulkner, 27, who was born in Senatobia, told NBC News she was across the highway from Walmart at a Little Caesars when shots rang out around 2:05 p.m. Sunday. She initially thought the sound was a tornado siren before seeing police cars rush toward the store. Someone entered the restaurant and warned people to leave.
“Y’all need to get out, y’all need to get out. They’re shooting at the Walmart,” the person said, according to Faulkner.
Faulkner said the killing was the result of a policing culture that too often turns minor encounters into dangerous confrontations.
“We lost a child because of carelessness, recklessness of the police,” she said.
“This was going to eventually end up with them killing someone, because they overreact on small things that shouldn’t escalate,” Faulkner added.
Faulkner described her own encounter with Senatobia police in the same Walmart parking lot on Mother’s Day 2025. Body camera video released to media showed officers questioning her about a handicapped-accessible parking tag in her car. Faulkner said the tag belonged to her grandmother, who was inside the store, and offered to move the car. She had her then-2- and 3-year-old children in the back seat. The situation escalated after she asked for a supervisor, and she was pulled from the car and handcuffed on the ground. An officer accused her of resisting.
“I don’t feel safe in here,” Faulkner said in the video. “She grabbed me out my car. My kids is in my car.”
Faulkner was charged with disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and a handicapped parking violation. Senatobia police said at the time that “this incident could’ve very easily ended with a citation or even a warning until the actions of the suspect escalated this encounter.” Nine months later, Faulkner said she signed a form stating the charges had been dropped.
Looking back, she said, “I honestly thought I was going to be killed in front of my children.”
Mark Lesure, 41, a lifelong Senatobia resident, said Kohen’s death made him “very angry, furious.” He said the community has “no trust” in police after previous incidents and described the killing as the result of earlier failures to hold officers accountable.
“We’ve had a lot of situations of police brutality that led up to this right here,” Lesure said. “All the police brutality that led up to this was left unchecked. If it had been checked in the past, maybe we wouldn’t be talking about this baby being killed.”
Senatobia officials said Tuesday that they were cooperating with the state investigation and urged the public to avoid speculation while the process continues.
“We understand that emotions are high and that many questions remain. We respectfully ask our community to avoid speculation and the spread of unverified information while the investigation is underway,” the statement said.
The city acknowledged Kohen’s death as “a heartbreaking tragedy” and extended condolences to the family. Senatobia police also said on Facebook that the department was “committed to full transparency.”
“As the investigation progresses and facts are verified, we will share as much information as possible,” the department said.
But for Kohen’s family and residents who watched protesters met with tear gas two days after a baby was killed, transparency remains an unfulfilled promise. The public has not seen the footage. The officer has not been named. The family’s account and the official account remain sharply at odds. And what began as an alleged shoplifting call has left a 1-year-old dead, another person critically injured, and a community demanding to know why police opened fire.
As Crump wrote, “We cannot accept a world where an alleged shoplifting call ends with a child dead!”
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