Special Investigations

Press Freedom Defense Fund

Black Residents Warned of Abusive Cops for Years. Then Police Shot and Killed a Toddler.

In the Mississippi town where Kohen Wiley died, community members had urged leaders to rein in the police. Are they listening now?

Outside the Walmart in Senatobia, Mississippi, where police shot and killed 1-year-old Kohen Wiley, a shrine of stuffed animals sits between the garden center and the pharmacy. There are teddy bears, elephants, and kangaroos with babies in their pouches. There is a Bluey plush toy — Kohen’s favorite cartoon — along with matchbox cars, a green plastic tractor, and an array of artificial flowers.

A banner frames the display, featuring a celestial image of baby Kohen wearing gingham overalls. A handwritten sign reads, “Justice Delayed is Justice Denied.”

In the parking lot, a cop pulled a gun on a gray Ford Fusion on a Sunday afternoon and fired while Kohen’s mother held him in the passenger’s seat. A bullet struck the child on his right side, tearing through his small body and exiting his left. The driver, who was also hit, sped to a hospital, but it was too late. At 19 months old, Kohen was dead.

The killing sparked anguish and rage in Senatobia, a small city some 40 miles south of Memphis, Tennessee. At protests and press conferences, people demanded answers, while officials stayed mostly silent. It took several days for the mayor to deliver a scripted video statement that did not even include the child’s name.

The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation announced a probe into the case. Speaking before an agitated crowd, state Department of Public Safety Commissioner Sean Tindell said this could take months, refusing to say when — or even whether — his agency would provide further updates.

Until then, the official narrative would be a version of a familiar tale told by those who kill under color of law: On June 14, Senatobia police got a shoplifting call from Walmart over baby clothes and a pack of Pampers diapers. According to an MBI press release, officers tried to stop “two subjects and a juvenile child fleeing from the store.” The suspects “drove in the direction of the officers, almost striking one.” That’s when an officer fired.

Police offered nothing to back the story. A witness video captured mostly chaos as the car drove off, while a woman who asked not to be named told a local TV station she saw police chasing the car before hearing gunshots. Nevertheless, the police narrative took off. On Facebook pages like “Senatobia Happenings UNCENSORED,” commenters blamed Kohen’s mother for his death.

The accusations escalated after famed civil rights attorney Ben Crump took the family’s case, with critics accusing him of stoking racial grievances for profit. When Crump released a video of Kohen’s mother, Vel’lesiya Wiley, telling her side of the story — saying she “raised my baby up” to warn officers that Kohen was with her — a wave of racist vitriol followed. Some demanded to know why Kohen wasn’t in a car seat. Others said she’d used him as a “human shield.”

The comments were shockingly cruel. They also ignored what Black residents of Senatobia, which is about 40 percent Black, had long insisted: Police treated them with contempt and brutality.

A year earlier, at the same Walmart where Kohen was killed, a police officer forced a woman from her car in front of her children for parking in a handicapped spot — part of a string of violent incidents that made national news. In the summer of 2025, Senatobia’s board of aldermen finally voted to dismiss the police chief.

By then, the department had already hired the officer who would later be identified in the local press as involved in killing Kohen Wiley – a police sergeant who’d been previously sued for misconduct while working at two different law enforcement agencies. Just two days before Kohen was killed, a Black officer filed a complaint against him for making a racist remark.

To racial justice activist Patrick Lumumba, the decision to hire such a man was emblematic of the city’s disregard for Senatobia’s Black community. “You think they didn’t know about his past?” he asked. “But who was he gonna hurt? If he hurt anybody it wasn’t gonna be white people.”

On the last Saturday in June, as the family laid Kohen to rest, the Senatobia Walmart was relatively quiet. A police car was parked across the shopping plaza, where protesters had gathered the day before. At an empty restaurant where a TV played “Leave It to Beaver,” a young white employee said no one had come in all day, blaming the “rioters” for keeping customers away.

At the memorial site, a white woman retrieved a bouquet of dried flowers blown away by the wind. She defended the protests, adding that they had been peaceful. For all the speculation and rumor, she said, no one really knew what had happened. But nothing could justify shooting a 1-year-old boy.

“The whole thing is very, very sad,” she said. “No mother should have to bury her child.” She did not wish to share her name. “I don’t want to stir any trouble.”

Senatobia, the seat of Tate County, sits on the northern tip of the Mississippi Delta, a mostly rural region famous as the birthplace of the blues. Downtown, historical markers boast connections to Black musicians like pioneering country singer O.B. McClinton. “Being in the small contingent of African-American performers in country music was never a cinch,” his marker reads, “but McClinton often dealt with the subject good-naturedly in shows and songs.”

Easier to miss are the places that once saw violent attacks on the civil rights movement. Just north of town, on Highway 51, a marker commemorating the site where James Meredith was ambushed and shot during a solo march from Memphis to Jackson has been knocked from its post; it currently sits on the ground. After Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. resumed the 1966 march alongside other civil rights leaders, they passed through Senatobia, in the same spot where the Walmart now stands.

The activists were widely depicted as radical outsiders — “Hard Core Civil Rights Militants,” as one headline read. But the march included locals; many offered their homes to the visitors at great personal risk. “Most people would sleep in the backyard of people’s homes because they were scared they would bomb the home,” recalled independent publisher Gloria........

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