A one-year-old boy is dead because five officers drew guns on a car over an alleged diaper theft, and Mississippi's attorney general called the killing "justified." That's not a tragedy — that's a system working exactly as designed.
Kohen Wiley was shot and killed in June when Senatobia Police Sgt. Hunter Foster fired into a moving vehicle in a Walmart parking lot. Officers were chasing two women accused of shoplifting. The alleged stolen goods: diapers. Neither woman was ever charged with shoplifting, according to court records reviewed by HuffPost.
On Monday, AG Lynn Fitch announced the shooting "was justified." By Thursday, the family had finally seen the body camera footage. They learned about the AG's decision from the news — not from any official notification. The footage had already been leaked online.
"The word 'justified' has haunted me," said Veronica Roberson, Kohen's maternal grandmother. "I went to work and I had to find out through news sources … no one reached out to the family."
The officer's attorney, Martin Zummach, claims Foster had "no choice" because the car came right at him. The family disputes that. Attorney Ben Crump says the footage shows the fatal shot came from the side — backed by an independent autopsy the family commissioned. An image of the vehicle shows its shattered right front passenger window, not the windshield.
But here's what neither outlet is asking: why are police drawing weapons over a misdemeanor shoplifting call? Five officers with guns drawn for a diaper dispute. Shoplifting is a misdemeanor. It doesn't carry the death penalty — and it certainly shouldn't carry the risk of one for a toddler in the back seat.
HuffPost framed this around the family's grief and Crump's racial framing — his line about "a Black baby boy" whose life isn't "as valuable as the white diapers." The Guardian did the same. Both leaned hard on the emotional weight. Neither dug into the policy architecture that sent five armed officers sprinting at a car over alleged stolen baby supplies.
The real failure isn't just one officer's trigger finger. It's a system that prioritizes retail inventory over human life. It's an AG's office that can't be bothered to notify a family before announcing their baby's death was justified. It's a department that trains officers to escalate a shoplifting stop into a lethal encounter. It's footage leaked to the public before the family even saw it.
Crump and co-counsel Van Turner are calling for a federal investigation. Fair enough. But the federal government has been investigating police departments for decades, and babies still die in parking lots. The question isn't whether Washington will ride to the rescue. It's whether any level of government will stop treating misdemeanor calls like military operations.
Kohen Wiley would have turned two on November 1. Instead, his family is fighting for basic acknowledgment that his death was wrong — while the state of Mississippi tells them it was justified.
