Mississippi released video Thursday showing the fatal shooting of a 1-year-old boy by a police officer whom state authorities have cleared of criminal wrongdoing.
Kohen Wiley was killed in June when Senatobia police officer Sgt. Hunter Foster fired his gun into a moving vehicle while responding to a shoplifting call. Kohen’s family says footage of the fatal encounter shows the shooting was not justified.
The Mississippi Attorney General’s office said
this week its monthlong probe found that Foster’s use of force was appropriate. Foster’s attorney, Martin Zummach, has said his client had “no choice” but to shoot at the vehicle because it was going to hit him.
Ben Crump, a civil rights attorney representing Kohen’s family, said Foster was not in danger when he fired the shot that killed the 1-year-old. Crump said the video shows Foster fired that shot from the passenger side of the car.
Kohen's close relatives watched the footage shot during the June 14 encounter in a Walmart parking lot in Senatobia, about 40 miles (65 kilometers) south of Memphis, Tennessee. The video included footage from the camera worn by the officer who shot and killed Kohen.
Kohen would have celebrated his second birthday in early November, civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is representing Kohen’s family, said during a news conference Thursday.
“The word ‘justified’ has haunted me,” Kohen's maternal grandmother, Veronica Roberson, said during the news conference. “There’s no justification for that.”
Roberson said she found out from reading the news that the state had cleared the officer, and she also saw parts of the video that had been leaked online Wednesday. She called the lack of notice from the attorney general's office and the leak of the footage a “slap in the face” to her family.
Crump said the officers' response — running at the vehicle with guns drawn to apprehend alleged shoplifters — was excessive and reckless.
Kohen’s mother, Vellesiya Wiley, previously denied that she and her friend stole diapers from the store and they have not been charged, according to state and county court records.
“Diapers are something a mother needs for a child. Diapers should never cost a baby their life,” Crump said. “This decision sends a message that a Black baby boy, his life, is not as valuable as the white diapers that he is wrapped in.”
Martin Zummach, an attorney representing Foster, has said the footage vindicates his client because he was in danger from the moving vehicle and had “no choice” but to fire his gun.
“She came right at Hunter Foster and the other officer and he had to shoot his weapon,” Zummach said.
Vellesiya Wiley has disputed that her friend, who was driving, headed toward the officers.
Crump said the footage shows the fatal shot came from the side of the car, disputing that Foster was in imminent danger. An independent autopsy commissioned by the family concluded the same. An image of the vehicle shows its shattered right front passenger window.
The family's legal team called for the federal government to investigate the shooting.
The Mississippi Department of Public Safety on Thursday released portions of the body-worn camera footage from multiple law enforcement officers, including Foster. Darkhorse Press, a Mississippi crime and community news outlet with a focus on law enforcement, posted some of that footage on its website a day earlier. The organization’s founder, Therese Apel, is formerly the department's communications director.
The videos show Vellesiya Wiley, holding Kohen, as she and her friend run across the parking lot and enter their vehicle. Five officers approach the parked car with guns drawn. The car reverses away and crashes into a parked vehicle nearby as officers yell for it to stop.
The vehicle then accelerates forward as Foster steps toward it, directly in front, with his gun drawn. The wheels turn away from him, and he appears to put his hands on the hood as he jumps out of the way. He fires his gun, shattering the window of the front passenger side, where Kohen was seated on his mother's lap. The car continues to drive away before the video cuts out.
Two use-of-force experts reviewed the footage at the request of The Associated Press but provided conflicting assessments, illustrating the complexity of the encounter.
Charles “Joe” Key, a former Baltimore police lieutenant who frequently serves as an expert witness in police use-of-force cases, said that while it is a tragedy a child was killed, the shooting was a split-second decision that Foster made as the vehicle drove toward him and another officer. He said the driver of the car appeared to use the vehicle to commit assault with a deadly weapon. Wiley’s friend, who was driving the vehicle, has not been charged.
“The officer that fired the shots narrowly escaped being run over and appeared to touch the car as he was moving,” Key said. “The shooting was objectively reasonable.”
But John P. Gross, an expert on police use of force against moving vehicles, said Foster had used “really bad tactics.”
“He should never have placed himself in a position where he could have been struck,” Gross said, adding that an accusation of shoplifting did not justify “use of deadly force on a fleeing suspect.”
