Mississippi cleared Senatobia police Sgt. Hunter Foster of criminal wrongdoing in the shooting that killed 1-year-old Kohen Wiley. Two days later, the city accepted Foster’s resignation, and the family is still demanding a federal investigation.
Mississippi spent four months investigating the police shooting that killed 1-year-old Kohen Wiley and ultimately concluded that the officer who fired the fatal shots acted lawfully. Two days after that decision, the Senatobia Board of Aldermen accepted Sgt. Hunter Foster’s resignation from the police department.
The timing has turned an already painful case into an even more closely watched one. Foster was cleared on October 19, his resignation was accepted on October 21, body-camera footage was released publicly on October 22, and Senatobia Mayor Greg Graves confirmed the resignation on October 23.
The shooting happened June 14 outside a Walmart in Senatobia, Mississippi, after officers were alerted to two women leaving the store. Kohen’s mother, Vellesiya Wiley, was carrying her son as she and a friend entered a vehicle while officers moved across the parking lot with their guns drawn.
Video released by the state shows the vehicle reversing away from officers and striking a parked car before moving forward again. Foster stepped toward the front of the vehicle, appeared to put his hands on the hood as he moved out of its path, and then fired, shattering the front passenger-side window where Kohen was sitting on his mother’s lap.
Kohen was killed, and the driver was also wounded. Wiley and her friend have denied stealing diapers or other merchandise, and AP reported that neither woman has been charged with shoplifting or any other offense stemming from the Walmart incident.
On October 19, the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office announced that Foster’s use of force was justified and that he would not face criminal charges. Foster’s attorney, Martin Zummach, has argued that the officer had no choice because the vehicle was moving toward him and other officers.
Kohen’s family has rejected that conclusion from the beginning. Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who represents the family, says the released footage and an independent autopsy commissioned by the family support their argument that the fatal shot came from the side of the vehicle rather than from directly in front of it.
The body-camera footage did not end the dispute; it intensified it. The state sees an officer confronting a moving vehicle and acting in self-defense, while the family sees an officer placing himself near the car and then firing into a vehicle carrying a baby as it was leaving.
Then came Foster’s resignation. Graves told ABC News that the board accepted it on October 21 but did not say whether Foster was asked to resign or chose to leave on his own, and Foster’s attorney declined to comment to AP about the decision.
The resignation is not an admission of wrongdoing, and it does not reverse the attorney general’s finding that the shooting was justified. But it immediately raised another question for the family: if Foster is leaving Senatobia, can he simply take his certification and work somewhere else?
For now, the answer is potentially yes. A Mississippi Department of Public Safety spokesperson told AP that Foster remains certified as a police officer, and Kohen’s legal team is now calling for him to be decertified so another law-enforcement agency cannot hire him.
Crump called the resignation far short of accountability and said the family will continue pressing for a federal investigation. Their position is that leaving the department does not settle the central question of whether deadly force was necessary when officers were responding to what began as a suspected shoplifting incident.
There is no clever Buzzy twist to soften this one, and there should not be. A baby died in a Walmart parking lot, the state cleared the officer who fired, the officer left the department days later, and the two sides are still looking at the same video and reaching fundamentally different conclusions about what happened.
The case also carries another layer of history around Foster that is separate from Kohen’s shooting. AP reports that Foster and 12 other Southaven officers were sued over alleged civil-rights violations stemming from a 2019 arrest; the officers denied wrongdoing, and the city settled that case in 2022 without an admission of liability.
None of that changes the legal outcome announced by Mississippi this month. As of now, Foster has not been criminally charged in Kohen’s death, and the attorney general’s conclusion remains that the use of force was justified.
For Kohen’s family, however, the state decision is not the final word. Kohen would have turned 2 in early November, and his family is now asking federal authorities to look at a shooting that Mississippi says is closed but they very much believe is not.
