The Senatobia, Mississippi, police officer who shot and killed 1-year-old Kohen Wiley may not face any legal charges connected to the killing of a Black infant, but now that video footage of the shooting has been revealed, he is no longer on the police force, and, unfortunately, that’s about as close to any semblance of justice that will come of this case — which, of course, isn’t justice at all.
Attorneys for Kohen’s family told Action News 5 they’ve been informed that now-former Senatobia Officer Hunter Foster — the only officer out of the five to swarm the car Kohen was riding in who stepped directly in front of the car with his gun drawn — resigned from his position sometime after body-cam footage was released by the Mississippi Department of Pubic Safety, showing him running out of the store with the other officers after a Walmart employee told him accused shoplifters were getting away.
As News 5 noted, Foster’s gun was aimed at the car with Wiley inside it within 13 seconds of the encounter. The video makes it clear that his first instinct wasn’t to move out of the way of a moving vehicle, but to jump in its way and fire a gun into it, even as Kohen’s mother, Vellesiya Wiley, lifted him up to show there was a baby in the car, according to her own account of what happened on June 14.
As previously reported, Wiley and another Black woman, Latoya Ferrell, were accused of stealing a pack of diapers from that Walmart, but they weren’t charged with shoplifting, nor were they charged with any crime related to weaponizing a vehicle against law enforcement, an allegation Wiley has vehemently denied.
Unfortunately, it’s far from unusual for a cop to resign or be fired from one department over police violence or misconduct, only to be employed by a different police department, so there’s no guarantee that Foster won’t be patrolling streets full of Black people with the same itchy trigger finger he used to kill a 1-year-old Black child, but, for now, a dangerous cop is off the streets, and hopefully, he’ll never have a badge again.
