AG Clears Cop After Baby Dies

Police officer stands beside a stopped car at dusk — Photo: Gorodenkoff / Shutterstock

A one-year-old boy died in his mother’s arms after a police officer fired three shots into the car she sat in, and now his parents are standing outside the Mississippi Attorney General’s office demanding answers the state has refused to give them.

Story Snapshot

Senatobia Officer Hunter Foster fatally shot Kohen Wiley, 1, during a June 14, 2026 Walmart shoplifting response.
Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s office cleared Foster, citing “insufficient evidence of criminal conduct.”
A family-commissioned autopsy says the fatal bullet came from the side of the car, not the front.
Foster resigned after body-camera and surveillance video finally went public in late October.

What The Released Video Actually Shows

Mississippi’s Department of Public Safety released footage from three officer body cameras and two Walmart surveillance cameras on October 22, giving the public its first real look at the shooting. The video shows Vellesiya Wiley holding her son Kohen as she and another woman got into a vehicle in the parking lot. Moments later, Foster fired three shots toward the car while standing near its front or passenger side.

One of those three shots struck Kohen while he sat in his mother’s arms. The footage does not exist in a vacuum. It arrived months after the shooting, and only after the Attorney General had already announced her decision. That sequencing matters, because it meant the official conclusion reached the public long before anyone outside the investigation could judge the video for themselves.

Attorney General Fitch’s office said flatly that “the use of force was justified” and later clarified there was “insufficient evidence of criminal conduct” to charge Foster or any other officer involved. No criminal case will move forward. For Kohen’s parents, that finding closed a door they believe should still be open, and it’s why they’ve taken their grief to the steps of the very office that shut it.

A Family’s Autopsy Tells A Different Story

Attorney Ben Crump, representing the family, says an independent autopsy they commissioned found the fatal bullet entered from the side of the vehicle, not the front where officers say the danger was coming from. Crump argues the released video backs up that finding, not the state’s narrative of a driver bearing down on an officer. If the entry wound truly came from the side, it raises hard questions about where Foster was actually standing when he fired.

The state’s own account tells a different story. Investigators concluded the driver reversed, then accelerated forward and turned, appearing to move toward officers after they shouted for the car to stop. Foster’s attorney, Martin Zummach, says that moment left his client with no option but to fire, insisting the footage “vindicates” Foster by showing he was in real danger from a moving vehicle.

Those two readings of the same video cannot both be fully right, and that’s exactly the problem. A side-entry wound and a head-on charging vehicle point toward very different versions of what happened in those two or three seconds. Until an independent reconstruction nails down Foster’s exact position, the car’s speed, and the bullet’s path, both sides have a factual claim worth taking seriously, not dismissing.

Protest, Resignation, And What Comes Next

Kohen’s parents traveled to the Attorney General’s office to protest the justified ruling directly, turning a quiet legal memo into a public confrontation few expected an election-year official to face. Foster resigned from the Senatobia Police Department shortly after the video became public, and the city’s interim police chief stepped down as well, though neither departure came with an admission of wrongdoing.

Police Officer Who Shot Dead One-Year-Old Kohen Wiley Resigns After State Rulinghttps://t.co/N2DqaCnBf4 pic.twitter.com/CJWK5yDLgG

— Fish 4 News (@Fish4NewsUK) October 28, 2026

Research on police shootings involving moving vehicles shows departments with stricter rules on firing at cars see fewer such shootings overall, suggesting policy choices shape outcomes as much as any single officer’s split-second judgment. That’s a conversation Mississippi lawmakers and the Senatobia department now have to have, regardless of how the criminal question was resolved. A one-year-old is dead, a justified ruling has been issued, and a grieving family is still asking the state to show its work.