One officer in the Senatobia, Mississippi, Walmart parking lot where 1-year-old Kohen Wiley was shot on June 14 told state investigators he did not fire because another officer was standing behind the driver he would have aimed at.
"I did not fire my weapon because there was at least one officer behind the target driver which, if I fired, that officer could have been struck and killed," his statement reads. It is one of the new details in the redacted 65-page Mississippi Bureau of Investigation file, which Mississippi officials released and The Emancipator posted in full on November 9. Our read of all 65 pages follows. The names of officers, witnesses and the family are blacked out throughout.
The file arrives three weeks after Attorney General Lynn Fitch's office ruled the shooting justified, and after the officer who fired resigned, as we reported on October 27. His lawyer has identified him publicly as Hunter Foster.
What the file says happened
The MBI's summary says officers and Tate County sheriff's deputies were already inside the Walmart on Highway 51 North on an unrelated call, about a man reported to be harassing customers. Walmart asset protection staff then saw two women, whose names are redacted, carrying out what the summary calls "fraudulent transactions." The women ran to a gray 2014 Ford Fusion sedan. Kohen's mother has been publicly identified as one of them. Neither woman had been charged with any crime as of late October, the Associated Press reported.
According to the summary, the car reversed into a gray Infiniti QX-80 as officers ran toward it, then was put in drive and "sped toward the officers." One officer fired. The car hit the rear bumper of a Hyundai Elantra and left the lot for Highland Hills Medical Center in Senatobia, where the child was pronounced dead. The driver was critically injured and airlifted to Regional Medical Center in Memphis.
Two law enforcement statements in the file put the number of shots at "approximately three rounds." A man who was pulling into the lot with his family says he heard "three to four shots." Early accounts cited by The Emancipator described the vehicle as a truck. The file describes a sedan.
The officer who fired
The statement from the officer who fired, received by the MBI on June 19 through a Police Benevolent Association representative, opens with legal reservations rather than an account. He reserved his "constitutional right to remain silent" under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments and invoked Garrity v. New Jersey, the 1967 Supreme Court case that bars prosecutors from using statements a public employee is compelled to give under threat of losing his job. "As much as I would like to set the record straight, upon advice of counsel, I am not allowed to make any statements surrounding the incident of June 14, 2026," it says.
It then gives an account anyway. "Before I could get out of the path of the suspect vehicle, the vehicle was already striking me and the deputy to my right," it reads. "I kept my pistol sights on the silhouette of the driver and fired my service weapon."
A caution about all of these quotations: the MBI's own header on each statement says they "are summarized and are not verbatim," even though the file sets them in quotation marks.
The officer who did not fire
The second officer's statement describes the same car moving toward "two (2) officers to my right." Then it adds a line that bears on the central dispute in this case. "I and the officers with me were not informed of a child being present with the driver until after it was reported that there were injuries," it says. A Walmart asset protection investigator's statement, taken the day of the shooting, says staff had watched "two female subjects with an infant" in the store and that the pair "paid for only a box of diapers." The file does not say whether anyone told officers about the infant before they reached the car. Kohen's mother has said in a video released by the family's lawyer, Ben Crump, that she lifted her son to show officers he was in the car.
Evidence the file says does not exist
Two entries record dead ends. On July 8, a Tate County Sheriff's Office major told the MBI he had asked the camera maker, Axon, whether footage could be recovered from a body camera that was powered on but not activated at the scene. A setting can keep footage from before activation, the entry says, but "that feature is not enabled for our department," so nothing could be recovered.
The same day, a Mississippi Highway Patrol crash specialist downloaded the Ford Fusion's event data recorder under a search warrant. The report "revealed that there were no events stored."
Our timeline, with day counts
We built this from the dated entries in the file and from public statements.
June 14: Shooting. The MBI opens its case at the Senatobia police chief's request. Day 0.
June 17: Autopsy at the State Medical Examiner's Office, day 3.
June 19: The firing officer's statement arrives through the PBA, day 5.
July 1: Search warrant for the Ford Fusion returned to a circuit judge in Sardis, day 17.
July 8: Body camera and data recorder dead ends, day 24.
August 19: Toxicology report, final autopsy report and a closing memo stating that the case "warrants no further Bureau activity and is closed," day 66.
October 19: Fitch's office announces its finding, day 127, or 61 days after the MBI closed its file.
November 2: Kohen's parents protest at the attorney general's office in Jackson, the AP reported, day 141.
What the file does not say
Every page carries the same footer: "This document contains neither recommendations nor conclusions of MBI." So the file holds evidence, not a verdict. The judgment that the force was justified belongs to the attorney general alone, and the statement her office issued runs three sentences. It says the office reviewed "a June 14, 2026 incident in Senatobia involving one officer," found "the use of force was justified," and acted under Section 45-1-6 of the Mississippi Code. It gives no reasoning.
The cause of death is redacted in both places it appears. And the main summary carries a draft date of 10/21/2025, which cannot be right for a June 2026 shooting and looks like a typo.
What to watch
The criminal case is closed unless a prosecutor reopens it. Kohen's father, Davion Williams, has said he wants the officer prosecuted, the AP reported. The open legal question is a civil one. Under the Supreme Court's 2025 decision in Barnes v. Felix, which we explained in our earlier story, a court weighing excessive force looks at the whole encounter, not only the final seconds, and statements like the second officer's about who stood where would matter. As of Tuesday we found no civil rights lawsuit reported. For how one Texas officer's case moved from a shooting to a murder conviction, see our story on Amber Guyger's release on parole.
Two Taps News stories summarize reporting and the analysis discussed on Two Taps and Friends. They are not legal advice. Read our standards.
