The fatal shooting of a 1-year-old boy by a Mississippi police officer who fired at a vehicle while responding to a shoplifting call was a “justified” use of force, the state attorney general said Monday.
Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s office issued the brief statement four months after Kohen Wiley was killed when a police officer opened fire on a car that police said was fleeing from a Walmart parking lot in Senatobia.
“Today, the Office of the Attorney General announced it has completed the review of a June 14, 2026 incident in Senatobia involving one officer with the Senatobia Police Department,” the AG’s office said in the statement. “In this incident, the Attorney General’s Office found the use of force was justified.”
The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation conducted the investigation.
There was no immediate response from Wiley’s family, which has for months been taking part in protests demanding justice for the slain boy in the small town 40 miles south of Memphis, Tennessee.
The deadly shooting happened after the responding officers arrived at Walmart and saw “two subjects and a juvenile child fleeing from the store into a vehicle,” the MBI said.
Kohen’s mother, whom her lawyer identified as Vellesiya Wiley, was a passenger. Her friend was driving.
“Officers attempted to stop the vehicle, but the driver drove in the direction of the officers, almost striking one,” the MBI said in a June 14 report. “An officer then discharged their weapon and the vehicle fled the scene. The subjects arrived at a local hospital where one juvenile child in the vehicle was pronounced deceased, and another subject had critical injuries.”
Kohen’s mother has disputed that account.
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In a video her lawyer Ben Crump posted on social media in June, Wiley said they had gone to Walmart for diapers. She said that her friend was briefly stopped while they were leaving the store and that “I kept walking because it had nothing to do with me.”
“By the time me and my baby got in the car, she came,” Wiley said of her friend.
They encountered police as they began to back out, Wiley said.
“I raised my baby up trying to show them that he was in the car,” she said.
In that moment, Wiley’s friend inadvertently hit another car while Wiley’s door was open.
Wiley said her friend did not try to hit the officers. “They was all on the right side, and she was driving towards the left,” she said.
In July, the family’s lawyers, Crump and Van Turner, released a preliminary autopsy report that they contend showed that the bullet that killed the child and wounded the driver was fired through one side of the car, fueling fresh questions about whether the shooting was justified.
“His mother, who has not been charged with any crime, says she was trying to communicate to officers that there was a baby in the car,” Crump said.