Autopsy of 1-year-old killed by police in Mississippi raises questions

The family of a 1-year-old boy shot to death by police in Mississippi last month is demanding accountability after an independent autopsy they commissioned suggests law enforcement misrepresented the circumstances that led to the killing.

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Police shot the baby, Kohen Wiley, on June 14 in a Walmart parking lot in Senatobia, a city of about 8,000 people in the northern part of the state, about 40 miles south of Memphis.

Police said officers at the scene were responding to a report of shoplifting shortly after 2 p.m. local time. The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, which took charge of the probe, said in a statement that officers encountered two adults — who have since been identified as the boy’s mother, Vellesiya Wiley, and a female friend — and a “juvenile child,” whom they described as “fleeing from the store into a vehicle.” The bureau alleged the driver — the unidentified family friend — moved the vehicle “in the direction of the officers, almost striking one,” before the officer fired their weapon.

But an independent autopsy released Wednesday by the family’s legal team, spearheaded by civil rights attorney Ben Crump, calls that narrative into question. The autopsy, conducted by forensic psychologist Roger Mitchell and obtained by MS NOW, found that the baby was shot through the side of his body, complicating authorities’ claim that the car was driving toward police.

Crump and the family’s supporters cast the killing as the latest example of the tragic consequences of racist overpolicing — Kohen and his mother are Black — and demanded the authorities and Walmart release body camera and surveillance footage of the incident.

“They want us to believe that it was a life-or-death situation because that’s the only way you can justify shooting into a vehicle that you know there’s a baby in that car,” Crump said at the Wednesday news conference.

A spokesperson for the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, which oversees MBI, told MS NOW the investigation is continuing and declined to respond to questions Thursday. A spokesperson for the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office told MS NOW the office “does not comment on active investigations.” The person did not say whether the AG’s office was investigating the killing.

Kohen was pronounced dead at a hospital, where the driver went after the shooting, Vellesiya Wiley said in a video posted to Crump’s X account. She said the officers fired three to four shots — even after she held Kohen up to show them there was a baby in the car — and that one hit her son’s ribcage as she held him in the passenger seat.

“I watched my baby take his first breath,” she said at a news conference last month, “and I watched my baby take his last breath.”

The autopsy report says the gunshot entered through the toddler’s chest on the right side and exited through the left. At the Wednesday news conference, the family’s legal team displayed a photo of the passenger-side window of the vehicle almost entirely blown out. A single bullet hole also appears to be visible on the left side of the windshield, near the passenger seat.

Crump also took issue with authorities’ description of the infant as a “juvenile.”

“You do not call a baby a juvenile unless you already are building the case to justify what you did to that baby,” he said Wednesday.