Mississippi AG rules police shooting that killed 1-year-old Kohen Wiley justified

Mississippi's attorney general has ruled that a Senatobia officer was justified in fatally shooting 1-year-old Kohen Wiley. Critics demand the release of body-camera footage.

Mississippi attorney general clears officer in fatal shooting of infant Kohen Wiley

Mississippi's attorney general has ruled that a Senatobia police officer was justified in using deadly force during a June incident in which 1-year-old Kohen Wiley was shot and killed, pbs.org reported, citing an Associated Press investigation. The conclusion follows months of public mourning and demands for accountability, both in the small Mississippi town — roughly 40 miles south of Memphis, Tennessee — and across the United States.

The shooting took place in mid-June when Senatobia officers responded to a shoplifting call at a Walmart. Officers observed Vellesiya Wiley, Kohen's mother, carrying her son as she and a friend left the store, entered a vehicle and drove away. Both Wiley and her friend are Black. Police alleged the two women had stolen diapers and baby clothes. Kohen's mother has denied that either she or her friend took anything, and neither woman has been charged with shoplifting or any other offence, according to state and county court records.

According to a statement issued shortly after the shooting by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, officers attempted to stop the vehicle. The car then drove toward law enforcement, the bureau said, prompting an officer to open fire. Kohen was struck and killed; his mother's friend was badly wounded.

Martin Zummach, the attorney representing the officer who fired the fatal shot, said the attorney general's findings cleared his client of criminal wrongdoing. He said the driver of the vehicle "tried to kill" his client and the other officers at the scene.

"He had no choice but to fire his weapon," Zummach told the Associated Press.

Vellesiya Wiley disputed that account in a video released days after the shooting. She said her friend, who was driving, did not steer toward the officers.

Ben Crump, a nationally recognised civil rights attorney representing Kohen's family, has said that results of a preliminary independent autopsy indicate Kohen was shot from the side of the car, not the front — directly contradicting officers' account that the vehicle was heading toward them. On Monday, Crump pressed authorities over the continued withholding of body-camera footage.

"How can anyone accept that conclusion when Kohen's family and the public still have not been allowed to see the body-camera footage?" 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."

A photograph of the vehicle after the shooting shows a shattered passenger-side window and an apparent bullet hole through the windshield on the passenger side.

John P. Gross, an expert on police use of force involving moving vehicles, told the AP the shooting was almost certainly unjustified. "In terms of both officer safety, the safety of the occupants of the vehicle and general public safety, you don't shoot vehicles," Gross said. He added that best practice, if a vehicle were genuinely moving toward officers, would be to clear the path rather than fire.

Charles "Joe" Key, a firearms and ballistics expert and former Baltimore police lieutenant who frequently testifies in defence of police, said the image of the vehicle after the shooting suggests the officer fired from the side rather than from directly in front of the car.

"That indicates that the officer who did the shooting was not personally at risk at the time he shot," Key said. "The only way it would have been justified is if officers had been in the path of a car driving directly at them." Key added that body-camera footage would be decisive in establishing whether anyone was genuinely in danger.

Marquell Bridges, an activist working alongside Kohen's family, also called for the immediate release of footage from the scene.

"His family deserves the truth. The public deserves transparency," Bridges said in a statement. "We will not be silent. We will not look away. And we will not allow the life of a Black child to be treated as though it means nothing."

The killing of Kohen Wiley is the latest episode in a series of incidents that has strained relations between the Senatobia police department and the city's Black residents. Last year, a Senatobia officer pulled a Black woman from her car and onto the ground, threatening her with a Taser during a dispute over a disabled parking space in the same Walmart car park where Kohen was shot. Two years earlier, a Senatobia officer was fired after arresting a Black 10-year-old for urinating in public.

More recently, former Senatobia Police Chief Harold Vanderford was dismissed by the city's board of aldermen following reporting by The New York Times, Mississippi Today and Verite News that alleged he used racist slurs in private text messages.

Source: Google News MT