A 1-year-old child was shot and killed in a Walmart parking lot in Senatobia on June 14 after Mississippi police officers responded to a shoplifting call. Kohen Kartier Wiley died and an adult in the vehicle was critically wounded.
The shooting came at about 2:05 PM, according to the Senatobia Police Department, which said officers from that department and the Tate County Sheriff’s Department were at the store when the confrontation unfolded. The Mississippi Department of Public Safety said officers encountered two subjects and a juvenile child fleeing into a vehicle, then tried to stop it before an officer fired and the vehicle drove off. The department said the child later died at a hospital and no officers were seriously hurt.
The case is drawing attention because it involves a child too young to understand the moment he was in. Carolyn Stokes, reacting to the shooting, said, “I hear about it all the time,” a sentence that landed with the weight of a community already used to seeing police violence in the news. A gathering was planned for 5 p.m. on Tuesday at Senatobia City Hall to call for accountability.
But the official account does not settle the central question. The Mississippi Department of Public Safety said the driver drove toward officers and almost struck one, while members of Wiley’s family denied any shoplifting took place and gave a different account of who was inside the car. A clip of cellphone video obtained by Fox 13 Memphis shows a vehicle driving away from officers, and a photo of the car shows multiple bullet holes in the windshield, including one on the passenger side. WREG also reported witnesses who described two women leaving the store, one with a single box of diapers and one carrying the infant child.
The investigation has been turned over to the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, and no arrests had been announced at the time of the report. Until investigators explain who fired, why the shot was taken and what happened before the bullets hit the sedan, the death of Kohen Wiley remains both a tragedy and an unresolved test of what police say happened at Walmart in Senatobia.
