Mississippi attorney general backs police use of force in fatal shooting that killed one-year-old
Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch has ruled that police used justified force when officers fired on a car during a shoplifting investigation in Senatobia, killing one-year-old Kohen Wiley and critically injuring the driver. The decision lands at the center of a deeply contested case, one that has already ignited protests, sharpened scrutiny of police conduct, and intensified demands for video evidence that has not yet been released to the public.
The shooting happened in June after police were called to a Walmart store over a report that baby supplies, including nappies and baby clothes, had allegedly been stolen. Officers arrived to find two women and a child walking toward a car. When they tried to stop the vehicle, authorities say it was driven toward an officer, nearly striking him. One officer then opened fire. In the brief chain of events that followed, a child sitting on his mother’s lap in the passenger seat was fatally struck.
A single use-of-force decision changed a theft call into a fatal child death.
Kohen’s mother, Vellesiya Wiley, has denied the allegations of theft and has said she lifted her son from her lap to show officers he was there before gunfire hit him. Neither she nor the driver, Latoya Ferrell, has been charged with a crime. Ferrell was critically injured in the shooting. The absence of criminal charges against the women has become part of the public dispute, especially as the state has concluded that the officer’s actions met the legal threshold for justified force.
The attorney general’s office issued its conclusion in a short statement, without laying out a detailed public evidentiary record. Police have not released body-camera footage or CCTV recordings from the parking lot, leaving the factual sequence dependent on law-enforcement accounts, family statements, and the limited details included in public disclosures. In a case involving the death of a toddler, the lack of visible evidence has become as consequential as the shooting itself. Public confidence in the review process often rises or falls on what can be independently seen, not only on what authorities describe afterward.
Benjamin Crump, the Wiley family’s lawyer, rejected the finding and demanded release of the footage. He argued that the public cannot accept the conclusion without seeing the recordings, and said the family will continue pressing for what happened in the moments before the shooting. His challenge goes beyond one case file. It speaks to a recurring problem in police shootings: when body-camera and surveillance footage remain sealed, the official version can harden while public trust erodes.
Martin Zummach, who represents the officer who fired the shots, told the Associated Press that the driver had “tried to kill” his client and that the officer had “no choice” but to fire. That description places the case squarely in the law of perceived imminent threat, where an officer’s split-second judgment is later measured against whether deadly force was legally necessary. In practice, those judgments are among the hardest to unravel after the fact, especially when the confrontation occurs within seconds and in a crowded parking lot with a child in the car.
The timing of the shooting added another layer of public anger. It occurred on Juneteenth, the federal holiday marking the end of slavery in the United States, and it quickly drew protests in Senatobia. Demonstrators have alleged that race influenced the police response. Kohen and both women are Black, while the officer who fired is reportedly white. Those allegations have not been established in the public record, but they reflect the broader context in which the case is being judged: American communities have repeatedly watched police shootings become flashpoints for debates over race, force, and accountability.
Local trust was already under strain. Last month, the city fired its white police chief after newspapers uncovered text messages showing repeated use of racial slurs. That development has fed a wider sense that the department’s problems are not limited to a single incident. In cases like this, institutional credibility does not depend only on the facts of one shooting; it also rests on whether the agency reviewing the event can persuade the public that discipline, oversight, and disclosure are handled with consistency.
The legal conclusion may close one chapter, but it does not end the public-health and civic toll of the event. A child died in a police encounter tied to a retail theft allegation, a mother was left grieving and insisting the account is wrong, and a driver was critically wounded. The absence of released footage keeps the central questions alive: what officers saw, how the car moved, whether the threat was immediate enough to justify gunfire, and whether a less lethal response was possible. Until those recordings are made public, the state’s finding will remain a point of sharp contention rather than a settled answer.