Senatobia police responded on Sunday, June 14, to a shoplifting call at a local Walmart, where officers encountered two women and a child leaving the store, getting into a car and driving away, according to a statement from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation. The statement said officers attempted to stop the vehicle, but the driver drove in the direction of the officers, almost striking one, prompting an officer to fire a weapon. The vehicle then fled.
Vellesiya Wiley, Kohen’s mother, said in a video posted by civil rights attorney Ben Crump that her friend was driving and that officers were positioned on the right side of the road while her friend was driving toward the left, not toward them. She also disputed the shoplifting claim, saying she believed the driver paid for the diapers she was carrying.
Policing expert Ian Adams, a criminal justice professor at the University of South Carolina, said officers should not have fired at the car regardless of the circumstances. “Modern policing knows that shooting into a moving vehicle is a very bad idea and one to be avoided at almost all costs,” Adams said. He noted that vehicles often have other occupants, which was “obviously a concern here in the current case.”
Bernice King, daughter of the late civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., posted a statement on Instagram decrying the shooting. “We are treating items on a shelf as more valuable than a child,” she wrote. “That is not just bad policing; it is a moral collapse.”
The death drew comparisons to the 2023 killing of Ta’Kiya Young, a pregnant Black woman who was shot by police in a Columbus, Ohio, suburb after a shoplifting accusation. The officer in that case was acquitted of criminal charges and cleared by a use-of-force review board.
Marquell Bridges, president of the Building Bridges Coalition and an advocate for the Wiley family, said Kohen’s death was “just the breaking point” after years of problematic interactions between Black residents and police in Senatobia. Bridges pointed to a May 2025 incident in which an officer threatened Breshari Faulkner with a Taser, pulled her from her car and arrested her during a confrontation over a handicapped parking space at the same Walmart. In 2023, a Senatobia officer was fired for arresting a 10-year-old Black boy who had urinated in a parking lot; the family later settled a federal lawsuit with the city.
“There is a culture there that they are above the law – just because they wear a uniform,” said Carlos Moore, a civil rights attorney who represented the 10-year-old boy and others accusing the department of misconduct.
The city of Senatobia has about 8,300 residents, approximately 40 percent of whom are Black, according to 2020 census data. The mayor and a majority of the board of aldermen are white; only three Black aldermen have been elected since the city became a municipality in 1860, according to the local newspaper the Tate Record. The police department did not respond to questions about its racial makeup.
The officer who shot Kohen has been placed on administrative leave while the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation continues its inquiry. The MBI has said it will release police video of the shooting once the investigation is complete.
Kohen’s grandmother, Veronica Roberson, who babysat him often, described him as a happy baby with “the prettiest smile you could ever imagine.” She recalled how he loved to play with a toy lawnmower that blew bubbles when pushed. “That baby was my world,” she said.