A one-year-old boy is dead because a Mississippi police officer decided that a shoplifting call at a Walmart was worth pulling the trigger on a moving car. Kohen Wiley was sitting in his mother's arms in the front passenger seat when the bullets came through. He never made it to his second birthday.
What Actually Happened in That Parking Lot
According to the New York Post, officers from the Senatobia Police Department and the Tate County Sheriff's Department responded to a reported shoplifting at a Walmart in Senatobia, Mississippi. They spotted the suspects' car leaving the lot and moved to stop it. The Mississippi Department of Public Safety, in a statement obtained by Mississippi Today, claims the driver accelerated toward officers and nearly struck one of them. That is the official justification for what happened next.
An officer fired at the car. Video footage obtained by WREG shows at least one bullet hole punched through the front windshield. The passenger-side window was also blown out. Kohen's mother was holding him in the front seat when the shots were fired. The family drove themselves to a nearby hospital. Kohen died there.
The alleged crime that set this whole thing in motion? Stealing diapers. The family, for what it's worth, disputes even that. Kohen's great-grandmother Carolyn Stokes told WREG, 'We don't really know anything, why it happened or whatever. All we know is that car was shot up and a one-year-old baby was killed.'
A Witness Thought Cops Wouldn't Actually Shoot. She Was Wrong.
A woman who witnessed the shooting told WREG she heard the shots ring out across the parking lot but initially assumed officers hadn't really fired, because, in her words, 'this is Walmart.' That sentence is doing a lot of work. In broad daylight, in a busy suburban parking lot, her brain just couldn't accept that police were actually shooting.
Another witness told the outlet something that makes the official account harder to swallow. He said he watched law enforcement waiting in the lot before Kohen's mother and aunt even came out of the store. When they exited, one was holding a box of diapers. The other was holding the baby. That is what the officers were looking at when they decided this situation required deadly force.
The Family Wants Accountability. So Far, Nobody's on Leave.
Kohen's grandfather, Carlos Haynes, told WREG: 'I'm just at a loss for words, to be honest. Somebody needs to be held accountable for it.' That is a man being extraordinarily measured about the fact that a cop killed his one-year-old grandson over a box of diapers.
The Senatobia Police Department has handed the investigation off to the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, which is standard practice when a cop shoots someone in Mississippi. Tate County Sheriff Luke Shepherd told Mississippi Today that his department is conducting its own independent investigation to determine whether any deputies involved will be placed on administrative leave. Notice that said 'determine if.' As of this reporting, nobody has been suspended. Nobody has been named. Nobody has faced any consequence of any kind.
The Legal and Moral Question That Keeps Coming Up
Law enforcement agencies have long-standing policies, in many jurisdictions, against firing at moving vehicles. The logic is simple: bullets don't stop cars, and once you start shooting into a moving vehicle you have no control over where it goes or who it hits. You also have no control over who is sitting inside it.
The DPS statement frames the shooting as a defensive action, an officer in fear of being struck by the car. That is the lane every police shooting gets funneled into because it is the legal threshold that matters. But there is a one-year-old boy who is dead, and the crime being investigated was shoplifting. Those two facts are going to sit next to each other in the public record forever, no matter what the investigation concludes.
The Dingo Take
Let's be precise about what happened here. A baby is dead. Not a suspect. Not a threat. A one-year-old who had no idea what a Walmart was, let alone what shoplifting means. His mother was holding him in her arms when an officer decided to fire into the windshield of a moving car over an alleged retail theft. Whatever the legal outcome of this investigation, that is the irreducible fact at the center of it.
The 'he almost hit an officer' framing will do a lot of heavy lifting in the months ahead. It almost always does. It is the magic phrase that transforms any police shooting into a defensible use of force, and the bar for proving it false is set so impossibly high that charges are exceptionally rare. Kohen's family is going to have to watch that process play out and be told, very possibly, that everything was done by the book.
Here's what the book apparently allows: shooting into a car containing a baby because someone allegedly stole diapers. If that sentence doesn't make you want to burn the book down and write a better one, you have stopped paying attention.
