A baby named Kohen Wiley is dead in Senatobia, Mississippi, and the official explanation begins with a box of diapers.
On the afternoon of Sunday, June 14, Senatobia police shot and killed a 1-year-old inside a silver sedan in the parking lot of a Walmart on U.S. 51.
Officers had been called to the store over an alleged shoplifting — a single box of diapers, according to family members and witnesses.
The adult friend who was driving, with Kohen’s mother holding him in the car, was critically wounded. Kohen was pronounced dead at a local hospital soon after. He was one year old.
The killing has shaken the small north Mississippi town of roughly 8,500 people, about 40 percent of them Black, and has drawn national attention from civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who now represents the Wiley family.
It has also exposed a yawning gap between what police say happened and what Kohen’s family says they watched happen.
Two Stories, One Baby is Dead
The state’s version comes from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, which has taken over the case.
According to the agency, officers encountered two adults and a child fleeing the store into a vehicle, tried to stop the car, and opened fire only after the driver allegedly drove toward the officers and nearly struck one.
None of the officers was seriously hurt.
Kohen’s family tells it differently — and they insist the cameras will back them up. Vallesiya Wiley, the baby’s mother, says no theft ever happened, and that the self-checkout footage will show they paid for the diapers.
She says she was holding Kohen and was never part of any dispute. As she and her friend began to back the car out, she says, multiple officers approached with their guns drawn.
“I raised my baby up, trying to show that he was in the car,” she said in a video released by Crump.
The officers fired anyway. One round struck Kohen in his rib cage, she said; others hit her friend in the arm and thigh.
She flatly rejected the claim that the car was driven at police. The officers were standing to the right of the vehicle, she said, while her friend was steering to the left — away from them. “They purposely just shot into the car,” she said.
Grief Met With Gas
On Tuesday, hundreds of people marched through downtown Senatobia to demand accountability, gathering across from City Hall and moving toward the same Walmart where Kohen died.
There, officers in gas masks, lined up under the store’s entrance, fired tear gas into the crowd. People who had come to mourn a baby scattered through a parking lot, choking on the fumes.
The response did not calm the town. For many residents, it confirmed exactly what they had been saying for years.
“It’s Not Just About Kohen”
Senatobia’s crime rate sits below the national average, yet residents told NBC News that their local police have steadily escalated confrontations with the community — unnecessary stops, arrests, and uses of force that went unanswered.
“All the police brutality that led up to this was left unchecked,” one resident said. “If it had been checked in the past, maybe we wouldn’t be talking about this baby being killed.”
Marquell Bridges, who helped organize Tuesday’s protest, said, “This is definitely about Kohen, but it’s not just about Kohen.” It is, he said, about a long history of overpolicing, racism, and brutalization that a community has finally decided it will no longer absorb in silence.
Crump, who represented the families of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Trayvon Martin, framed the killing as a line that should never have been crossed.
Kohen’s mother has not been charged with any crime, he noted, and says she was trying to tell officers there was a baby in the car.
They fired anyway.
“We cannot accept a world where an alleged shoplifting call ends with a child dead,” he wrote.
What Happens Now?
The officer who fired the fatal shots has been placed on administrative leave, a routine step after deadly police shootings, but officials have not released his name.
Mississippi Department of Public Safety Commissioner Sean Tindell has urged residents to be patient while the Bureau of Investigation completes its work. No one has been arrested or charged.
Kohen Wiley’s mother has not been charged with anything. Her son is still dead.
And a community that says it warned everyone this was coming is being asked, once again, to wait quietly while a system that killed a baby over a box of diapers investigates itself.
