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On Tuesday, hundreds marched through downtown Senatobia, Mississippi, in protest of the police murder of 1-year-old Kohen Wiley two days prior.
Police responded to the protest, which stopped in front of the local Walmart and continued to grow in size, by teargassing the protesters.
On Sunday afternoon, police officers shot and killed 1-year-old Kohen in a car outside of the Walmart. Police claim that they were responding to a shoplifting call. After trying to stop the baby’s mother and her friend from getting into their car, the police officers shot at the car, killing the baby and injuring the friend.
Kohen’s family has hired prominent civil rights attorney Ben Crump to represent them. Crump said that the friend had been shopping for diapers, and was accused of stealing them, leading to a call to the police.
In a video released Wednesday, Crump spoke with Vallesiya Wiley, the baby’s mother. Wiley said that the police had tried to stop her friend who was with her, but that she continued walking toward the car with her baby because she was not involved in the dispute. Once she and her friend began to back out in the car, multiple officers came toward the car with their guns drawn, she said.
“I raised my baby up, trying to show that he [a baby] was in the car,” she said.
But police shot at them anyway, killing her son and critically injuring her friend.
“One of the shots hit him in his rib cage. And the other shots hit her in her arm and her thigh,” she said.
Wiley said that no shoplifting had taken place, and that the cameras at self-checkout would show that they had purchased the baby diapers.
Police claimed that Wiley’s friend had almost hit officers with her car, but Wiley disputed this narrative.
“They tried to say that she forcefully was trying to drive and hit them, but they were all on the right side and she was driving toward the left,” she said. “They purposely just shot into the car.”
Her baby was pronounced dead at a local hospital soon after.
“A one-year-old child is dead because police officers in Mississippi opened fire on a car in a crowded Walmart parking lot,” said Crump, who has represented families in high-profile police brutality cases, including the families of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Trayvon Martin.
“Kohen Wiley was a baby. His mother, who has not been charged with any crime, says she was trying to communicate to officers that there was a baby in the car. They fired anyway, leading to the death of an innocent one-year-old. We intend to seek justice for baby Kohen and the life that was stolen from him.”
In another post, Crump wrote, “We cannot accept a world where an alleged shoplifting call ends with a child dead!”
The police department stated on Tuesday evening that the officer who killed Kohen has been placed on administrative leave as the Mississippi Board of Review investigates. However, they have not yet released the name of the officer.
Some Senatobia residents have said that the local police department has escalated its violent interactions with community members in recent years.
“We’ve had a lot of situations of police brutality that led up to this right here,” one resident told NBC News. “All the police brutality that led up to this was left unchecked. If it had been checked in the past, maybe we wouldn’t be talking about this baby being killed.”
Community activist Marquell Bridges, who helped organize Tuesday evening’s protest, said, “This is definitely about Kohen, but it’s not just about Kohen.”
“It’s about a long history of overpolicing, racism and brutalization that the people have been suffering, and the people are saying we’re not going to take it anymore.”
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