SENATOBIA, Miss.—People scattered in a Walmart parking lot on Tuesday as law enforcement officers, who were wearing gas masks and lined up under the store’s grocery-side entrance, unleashed tear gas on the crowd that had gathered to protest the police killing of 1-year-old Kohen Wiley.
Two days earlier on June 14, the young Black child died after a Senatobia police officer fired into a moving car, killing him and injuring the child’s aunt, who was driving. Officers, who had been responding to a call alleging that someone had tried to steal a box of diapers, claimed that the car was driving toward the officer when he fired—a claim that some witnesses have disputed.
On Tuesday evening, the mayor and the Senatobia Board of Aldermen placed the officer on administrative leave. He has not been publicly identified.
Hours earlier, 200 people gathered about a mile away from the Walmart in downtown Senatobia outside City Hall, voicing exasperated anguish over the child’s death.
Leon White, a Senatobia resident since 1999, raised a protest sign that read, “The People Demand: End to Police Terror.” Along a section of Front Street, cornered off by police with snipers perched atop a row of vintage storefronts that include a soda shop and pharmacy, he walked with others angrily shouting, “No Justice, No Peace” in one accord and yelling profanities aimed at police.
White said that the city’s residents’ tension and distrustful relations with police, “has been a problem that has been building for a long time.”
“For many years, the police force was fine, but in recent years—I don’t know why—it’s become a big problem,” he said.
He blames it partly, but sharply, on inadequate safety training. He added that Senatobia does not have a crime problem. Indeed, Senatobia’s crime rate is below the national average and one of the lowest crime rates in Mississippi. The city has a population of around 8,500 residents, around 40% of whom are Black. Its police force is composed of about 30 officers.
“We are like a big family here, and people come from all over the immediate area to shop,” White said.
Video Evidence Won’t Be Released During Investigation
Two blocks away from City Hall on the steps of the Tate County Courthouse, Mississippi Department of Public Safety Commissioner Sean Tindell sought to calm the furor, vowing transparency once the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation finishes investigating Kohen Wiley’s shooting.
While protesters heckled him, Tindell said that MBI will thoroughly review information provided by witnesses and the videos that captured the shooting, including officers’ vest cameras and Walmart security camera footage.
“It’s important to us (investigators) to interview witnesses without the threat of intimidation,” the commissioner said. “It’s important that we keep civility during this process so we can get to the bottom of it and analyze all the evidence and ultimately make it available to you all.”
He did not provide any new details on the shooting itself. Tindell said five MDPS agents have been assigned to investigate the tragic shooting in coordination with the state’s attorney general’s office. He said it would be up to local law enforcement to determine whether the allegations of shoplifting were credible; Wiley’s family has denied allegations of shoplifting.
Tindell, in response to a reporter’s question, said no video evidence will be released until the conclusion of the investigation “because sometimes when video evidence is released early, witnesses won’t come forward because they feel like the case has been closed at that point.”
‘It Needs to Stop’
Shirley Hardin, who lives in nearby Como, Mississippi, said poor relations between residents and Senatobia police go back years. She pointed to Senatobia police’s arrest of an 11-year-old boy for urinating outside the jail in 2024.
“And now this happened with the baby,” she said.
Bettersten Wade was so troubled about Kohen Wiley’s shooting that she drove from her home in Jackson, Mississippi, to participate in the protest. She’s no stranger to losing loved ones after encounters with police. A jury convicted a Jackson police officer in the 2019 death of her brother George Robinson, though an appeals court overturned the conviction in 2024. Her son, Dexter Wade, died after a Jackson police cruiser struck him in March 2023, and she searched for him for months until August 2023, when she learned that he had died and the city had buried him in an unmarked pauper’s grave.
“We are in the 21st Century, not the 1960s, and we are still dealing with unjustified police violence,” Bettersten Wade told the Mississippi Free Press. “We are mad and exhausted, but we won’t go away quietly into the night.”
Britney Fallon, from Olive Branch, Mississippi, said many residents just want justice for the child. Many others are upset at what they believe is a trend “because things have constantly been going on like this down here in town in Mississippi. And it needs to stop.”
“He could have easily been your child, my child, anybody’s child,” Fallon continued. “We want the same justice for this child that would be served down to our African-American generation if it was one of us. This has to end.”
Ashton Pittman contributed to this report.
Follow the Mississippi Free Press’ coverage of Kohen Wiley’s death and read past stories here.
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