Mukta Joshi is a reporter at Mississippi Today. She is spending a year as a New York Times Local Investigations fellow. Joseph Cranney is a reporter at Verite News. Both report for the Deep South Today Investigative Reporting Center in collaboration with The Times.
Ten days ago, as our team at Mississippi Today, Verite News and The New York Times reported on the Senatobia Police Department’s fatal shooting of Kohen Wiley, a 1-year-old boy, a source came forward to share texts they said had been sent by Police Chief Harold Vanderford.
An example of one text conversation our team reported on. We scrolled through messages on our source’s phone and photographed them. That’s why there’s a glare on some of our images. We’ve hidden our source’s response in this exchange to protect their privacy. Credit: Mukta JoshiThe source, a colleague of the chief’s, said they suspected the chief would know who had given us the texts. But they agreed to let us publish the messages if we agreed not to publicly identify them.
The source showed us 10 text conversations from July 2025 to April 2026. In them, Vanderford uses a racist slur more than a dozen times, spelled various ways. As we previously reported, Vanderford wrote multiple times that he had been loudly and repeatedly saying the slur, sometimes so loud that his neighbors might have heard it. In one text, he wrote that he “almost beat a nigger and white woman’s ass a few minutes ago.”
Our source said these text conversations were between them and the chief. We took a number of additional steps to verify their authenticity. Here’s why we stand behind our reporting that Vanderford sent those texts:
1. The numbers lined up.
Under the contact labeled “Hal Vanderford” on our source’s phone, the number listed was 662-897-6708. We are publishing the full number in the interest of transparency.
No one answered at that number, and there was no personalized voicemail greeting. So we contacted three separate acquaintances of Vanderford’s, each of whom confirmed that the number we had matched the number they had saved for Vanderford. In the days since, that phone number has been disconnected.
We captured a photo of the phone number the text messages had come from, and noted it down. Credit: Mukta Joshi2. We looked for context clues.
In one of the text messages, Vanderford says he’s with a woman, whose name we’re withholding to protect her privacy. Two acquaintances of the chief identified her as the chief’s girlfriend. The woman is pictured with Vanderford on her Facebook profile, too.
Another text message includes a photo of a person who the chief calls “GAY!!!” We identified that person as a employee at the department.
Vanderford appears to have sent a number of text messages while watching college sports games, and we separately learned that the chief is a Mississippi State fan.Mississippi State’s schedules show that Vanderford was texting contemporaneously on dates when the Bulldogs were playing. On Oct. 18, Vanderford texted about a football game against Florida. Mississippi State played the Gators that day — we checked.
3. We reviewed the attached video and photos.
A message the chief sent on Thanksgiving Day includes a video attachment. The man recording the video can be heard addressing our source by name, saying, “You’re missing out.” The metadata of the video shows it was recorded two minutes before it was sent, on the same day.
We had already obtained the chief’s home address through his voter registration records and spoken to his neighbors, who confirmed he lived there.
So we compared the video he’d shared to a Google Street View image taken in February 2025 from the angle of the chief’s home. The images lined up perfectly.
At left: A screenshot from a video sent by Senatobia Police Chief Harold Vanderford on Thanksgiving Day in 2025. At right: A Google Street View image dated February 2025, captured from the angle of Vanderford’s home address.4. We asked Chief Vanderford himself. Many times.
We first contacted Vanderford on Friday, Aug. 21, and have since made more than a dozen attempts to reach him by phone, email and notes left at his home or office, sharing the specifics of our findings, and explicitly asking for his side of the story.As recently as Monday, we asked Vanderford and Lt. Shane Howell, a Senatobia police spokesperson, if Vanderford denies the texts came from him.Neither have responded to our inquiries.
Below, we are publishing Vanderford’s uncensored text messages.
Editor’s note: Mississippi Today does not normally publish racist slurs, but we chose to do so in this case because the slurs themselves are central to why our team reported this story.
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