The Mississippi Attorney General’s office found that “use of force was justified” when a Senatobia police officer shot and killed one-year-old Kohen Wiley in June.
The state will not press charges against the officer who shot the baby while responding to reports of a shoplifting incident at a Walmart.
The attorney general’s findings were delivered in a perfunctory, two-sentence press release on Monday.
It didn’t include the name of baby Wiley.
It didn’t express empathy for the loss of the Black toddler.
Significance. Baby Kohen was killed on June 14 when, according to a statement from the Senatobia Police Department, officers responded to reports of a shoplifting incident at a Walmart at approximately 2:05 pm.
At the time, local outlets previously reported that the suspects were two adults and one child who attempted to run the officers over with their truck during a confrontation. One of the adults was Kohen’s mother, Vellesiya Wiley, law enforcement claims.
Action News 5 says that officers fired shots at the truck to stop them from striking the officers. One bullet hit Kohen, and the other hit Vellesiya’s friend, the driver of the truck.
Kohen was taken to a nearby hospital and pronounced dead there.
Overlooked angle. In the days and months following the shooting, local law enforcement vowed “full transparency” in investigating Baby Wiley’s death. Community members protested the use of lethal force, and Black lawmakers, lawyers and activists pushed for justice and accountability.
So it is especially frustrating to those groups that the brief statement failed to name the officer under investigation or include detailed findings from the investigation.
“How can anyone accept that conclusion when Kohen’s family and the public still have not been allowed to see the body-camera footage?” Attorney Ben Crump, one of the many advocates to question the decision not to press charges, asked in a social media post.
Independent investigations by multiple local news outlets have released the name of the alleged officer who fired and killed baby Wiley, although no state or local officials have confirmed the name of the officer.
Power structure. A previous investigation by The Emancipator shows that Black boys are disproportionately victims of police killings compared to boys of other races and ethnicities. The analysis was done with a database compiled by The Washington Post that showed police killings from 2015 to 2024 across the country. With filtering, the researchers found that 67 Black boys were shot and killed by the police. Over the same time period, 42 Hispanic boys and 41 White boys were killed by police shootings.
When comparing these statistics to the greater Black and White boy population in 2024 U.S. Census data, The Emancipator investigation found that Black boys are 6.5 times more likely to be shot and killed by police officers.
What experts say. “A 1-year-old baby was shot and killed by a police officer, and now the state of Mississippi says that use of force was justified,” Crump said in a statement.
“If the footage supports the state’s decision, release it. We will not stop fighting until this family gets the truth.”
