The fatal shooting of a 1-year-old boy by police at a Walmart in Mississippi has sparked protests and demands for transparency in the state’s investigation after other incidents in the community in recent years have sown distrust with law enforcement.
Some Senatobia residents told NBC News that they believe the local police department has escalated interactions with the public that generated unnecessary arrests or uses of force. The shooting Sunday in a Walmart parking lot that led to the infant’s death is only the latest instance that residents say must result in better police training.
“We lost a child because of carelessness, recklessness of the police,” said Breshari Faulkner, 27, who was born in Senatobia, a town of 8,500 people about 40 miles south of Memphis, Tennessee.
“This was going to eventually end up with them killing someone, because they overreact on small things that shouldn’t escalate,” added Faulkner, who was handcuffed on the ground by Senatobia police in the same Walmart parking lot in May 2025 during an incident over a handicapped-accessible parking space that was caught on police body camera.
On Sunday, Faulkner was at a Little Caesars across the highway from the Walmart when shots rang out at about 2:05 p.m. At first, she thought the noise was due to a tornado siren, but eventually, she said, she saw other police cars racing around the curb to get to the store. Someone burst into the restaurant, she said, warning: “Y’all need to get out, y’all need to get out. They’re shooting at the Walmart.”
Senatobia police were at the Walmart to respond to a call about an alleged shoplifting and encountered two people with a child fleeing from the store into a vehicle, state investigators said.
The officers “attempted to stop the vehicle, but the driver drove in the direction of the officers, almost striking one,” investigators said. “An officer then discharged their weapon and the vehicle fled the scene. The subjects arrived at a local hospital where one juvenile child in the vehicle was pronounced deceased, and another subject had critical injuries.”
None of the officers was seriously injured, investigators said.
The Senatobia Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday, including questions about the identity and employment status of the officer involved. Following the shooting Sunday, the city said the officer had been placed on leave, and the department said on Facebook that it was “committed to full transparency.”
“As the investigation progresses and facts are verified, we will share as much information as possible,” it said.
Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is representing the family, identified the child who was killed as Kohen Wiley. He said Kohen was in a vehicle with his mother and a family friend when he was shot. The friend was critically injured, Crump said.
“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,” Crump said in a statement Tuesday.
In a video posted Wednesday on social media, Crump identified the child’s mother as Vellesiya Wiley, who said they had gone to Walmart for diapers. She said her friend was stopped while they were leaving the store, but “I kept walking because it had nothing to do with me.”
“By the time me and my baby got in the car, she came,” Wiley said of her friend. They encountered police as they began to back out, and Wiley said, “I raised my baby up trying to show them that he was in the car.”
In that moment, she said, her friend hit another car while Wiley’s door was open. “By the time I set my baby down, it was like three to four shots,” she said. “One of the shots hit him in his rib cage and the other shots hit her in her arm and her thigh.”
Wiley said the officers said at the scene that “they were shoplifting,” but she said she was not charged after they drove to a hospital where her son was pronounced dead. She also denied her friend tried to hit the officers: “They was all on the right side, and she was driving towards the left.”
The identity of the family friend was not immediately available, and the child’s family did not respond to a request for comment.
The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation said it was gathering evidence and would share its findings with the state attorney general’s office.
Police bodycam video and other possible evidence will not be released until after the state’s independent investigation is complete and presented to the attorney general’s office for potential criminal charges, state Public Safety Commissioner Sean Tindell said at a news conference Tuesday. He did not provide a timeline for that process and declined to discuss other details of the shooting.
Geoffrey Alpert, a policing expert and criminology professor at the University of South Carolina, said law enforcement officers are generally trained not to shoot in front of moving vehicles and to avoid injury by stepping out of their paths.
“A bullet is not going to stop the car,” Alpert said. “And if you shoot the driver, then you have an unguided missile.”
That officers may have been aware that a child was with the adults as they left the store is also concerning, he said.
“You don’t want to take the chance of hitting an innocent bystander,” he said. “That’s what makes it so horrific is the presence of this child.”
Senatobia has been in the national spotlight previously for issues involving policing and children. Three years ago, officers arrested a 10-year-old boy for urinating next to his mother’s car while she was in an attorney’s office. The child was initially sentenced to probation and required to write a two-page report about Kobe Bryant before the case was dismissed.
Mark Lesure, 41, a lifelong Senatobia resident, said the most recent incident involving Kohen made him “very angry, furious.”
“We’ve had a lot of situations of police brutality that led up to this right here,” said Lesure, who said he had his own physical encounter with the previous Senatobia police chief, who was white, in 2023. “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.”
Lesure said the community has “no trust” in police after previous incidents. He said the community felt that any time local police were called, it “immediately puts a Black person’s life in danger or in danger of going to jail” unnecessarily.
The police department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Lesure’s allegations.
Lesure said the Walmart where the shooting occurred draws a lot of customers from the surrounding rural areas.
“All of them come to this Walmart,” he said.
Demonstrators gathered Tuesday evening outside the store, prompting it to close temporarily. In videos shared online, law enforcement officers lined up outside the entrance wearing respirators as they deployed tear gas.
Marquell Bridges, a community activist from Senatobia who organized the protest, said demonstrators were nonviolent.
“The only violence came from the police department when they decided to tear-gas peaceful protesters,” he said.
“This is definitely about Kohen, but it’s not just about Kohen,” Bridges added. “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.”
In a statement Tuesday, Senatobia officials said they were committed to cooperating fully with the state investigation.
“We understand that emotions are high and that many questions remain. We respectfully ask our community to avoid speculation and the spread of unverified information while the investigation is underway,” the statement said.
It acknowledged Kohen’s death as “a heartbreaking tragedy” and extended condolences to the family. Walmart also said it would assist in the state’s investigation.
Faulkner, who was across the street from the Walmart when the shooting occurred, said the chaos brought back memories of her own police encounter in the same parking lot on Mother’s Day 2025.
In a police bodycam video released to the media, officers question Faulkner about a handicapped-accessible parking tag in her car and whether it belonged to her. Faulkner told them that it belonged to her grandmother, who was in the store. She offered to move her car while officers asked her whether her grandmother actually came out of the vehicle.
Faulkner was also asked for her identification. As the situation grew tense, Faulkner, who had her then-2- and 3-year-old children in the back of the car, asked an officer for a supervisor. Eventually, the incident escalated, with Faulkner being pulled from the car and handcuffed on the ground, the video shows. The officer accused Faulkner of “resisting.”
“I don’t feel safe in here,” Faulkner said in the video. “She grabbed me out my car. My kids is in my car.”
Faulkner was charged with disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and a handicapped parking violation. In a statement at the time, Senatobia police said that “this incident could’ve very easily ended with a citation or even a warning until the actions of the suspect escalated this encounter.”
But nine months later, Faulkner said, she went to a meeting at which she signed a form saying the charges had been dropped. Senatobia police did not immediately respond to a request for comment about her case.
Looking back, Faulkner said, “I honestly thought I was going to be killed in front of my children.”
Knowing a child has since lost his life makes her more certain that local police reforms are necessary — or at least conversations with the community to help ease the tension.
“It’s not all of the police,” she said. “But I don’t want to see anyone else get hurt because of the ones who can’t communicate.”
