A one-year-old boy is dead after a police shooting in Senatobia, Mississippi, and the national media are already turning a still-unfolding tragedy into a racial morality play before the investigation is complete.
Kohen Wiley was fatally shot Sunday when Senatobia police responded to a shoplifting call at a local Walmart. Officers encountered two women and a child leaving the store in a vehicle. The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation says that when officers tried to stop the car, "the driver drove in the direction of the officers, almost striking one. An officer then discharged their weapon and the vehicle fled the scene." Kohen's mother, Vellesiya Wiley, says her friend—the driver—was also hit. Wiley disputes the police account, saying in a video posted by attorney Ben Crump that officers "were all on the right side and she was driving towards the left." She also says the diapers were paid for.
Those are the facts we have. They are incomplete, and they demand a thorough investigation—not a media circus.
But the circus arrived on schedule. Arkansas Online framed the shooting as the latest entry in a "long list" of Black Americans killed over "petty criminal offenses," name-checking George Floyd and Ta'Kiya Young—a pregnant woman shot by Ohio police in 2023 after, police said, she accelerated toward an officer. That officer was acquitted and found justified by a review board. The parallel isn't the clean comparison the press wants it to be.
Bernice King declared in an Instagram statement that "we are treating items on a shelf as more valuable than a child" and called it "moral collapse." That's a powerful quote. It also assumes facts not yet established—namely, that the shooting occurred because of shoplifting, not because an officer reasonably believed he was about to be run over. Both things can be true: diapers aren't worth a child's life, and officers have a right to defend themselves from a moving vehicle. The investigation exists to sort out which reality governed that moment.
Meanwhile, the same media ecosystem that descends on small towns to amplify police-accountability narratives routinely buries the consequences of progressive crime policies that put repeat offenders back on the street. In Riverside, California, Elias Julian Calderon—charged this week with first-degree murder after a fatal stabbing near UC Riverside—is a prior-strike felon, according to prosecutors. In Los Angeles, an armed carjacking suspect with multiple warrants led LAPD narcotics officers onto the 210 Freeway before being shot and taken into custody. These cases don't fit the narrative, so they get local coverage and nothing more.
Criminal justice expert Ian Adams, speaking to Arkansas Online, said that "shooting into a moving vehicle is a very bad idea and one to be avoided at almost all costs" because of the risk to other occupants. That's a legitimate policy debate worth having. But a policy debate requires honesty about what happened—not a rush to judgment from activists and press outlets who benefit from division.
A one-year-old is dead. His mother is grieving. The facts will come from the investigation, not from Instagram statements or cable news panels. The question is whether anyone will still be interested in justice once the narrative loses its utility.
