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.
The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation has completed its review of the Senatobia Police Department’s fatal shooting of a Black toddler and sent its findings to Attorney General Lynn Fitch, the department’s interim police chief said this week.Angelica Maze, the chief, said Fitch will decide when to release more information about the shooting of the toddler, 1-year-old Kohen Wiley. Maze, appointed earlier this month after her predecessor was fired, released a statement on Thursday after months of uproar about law enforcement’s refusal to release body-worn camera and surveillance footage of the incident.
A representative for Fitch said the office wouldn’t comment because the case remains active. If the attorney general decides to pursue a case against any officers involved, the findings would be presented to a Mississippi grand jury, which would decide if there is sufficient evidence to bring criminal charges.
Patrick Lumumba, who founded the Senatobia Committee for Accountability and Transparency in the wake of the shooting, which occurred on June 14, said Maze’s statement doesn’t address any of the community’s concerns.
“We still don’t have any video footage. We still don’t have any clarity as to what M.B.I. has determined,” Lumumba said. “We don’t know anything other than the files are on Lynn Fitch’s desk.”The Senatobia Board of Aldermen fired the department’s former chief, Harold Vanderford, after Mississippi Today, Verite News and The New York Times revealed he had routinely used racist slurs against Black people in private texts.
Kohen was fatally shot in a Walmart parking lot after two women, including his mother, were accused of shoplifting diapers and baby clothes. At least five officers converged on them as the pair got into a car, with Kohen seated on the lap of his mother, Vellesiya Wiley, in the front passenger seat.
The state Department of Public Safety says a police officer responding to a shoplifting call on Sunday, June 14, 2026, shot at a car that drove in the officer’s direction, killing 1-year-old Kohen Wiley. Credit: Courtesy of Carlos Haynes and Veronica RobersonWiley said she had lifted her son up to show officers that there was a baby in the car. Then she heard three or four gunshots. Bullets struck the car, the driver and Kohen.
Neither woman has been charged with shoplifting.
In a statement the day of the shooting, MBI said the car had driven toward officers, “almost striking” one. The agency released documents “in error” that identified a Senatobia officer, Hunter Foster, as the subject of its investigation. The next day, the Board of Aldermen placed Foster on paid administrative leave.
Since then, law enforcement has remained tight-lipped about the shooting and the progress of the state’s investigation. Sean Tindell, the commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, which oversees M.B.I., said the investigative report and video footage would be made publicly available only if a prosecuting agency confirmed the case would not be prosecuted, or if a grand jury refused to indict.
Tindell announced his run for attorney general, and Fitch announced her run for governor in August.
The only video footage that the public has seen was captured by an eyewitness, Desirae Smith. Her video shows three officers and one sheriff’s deputy running behind the car as it drove away. Smith said nobody in law enforcement had contacted her. The authorities haven’t reached out to Wiley either, said Veronica Roberson, her mother.
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