The police officer who shot and killed a 1-year-old boy in Mississippi when he fired into a moving vehicle while responding to a shoplifting call has resigned, the Senatobia mayor told The Associated Press Friday.
Sgt. Hunter Foster, 33, had been cleared of criminal wrongdoing by the Mississippi Attorney General's office earlier this week after its monthslong probe concluded his use of force had been justified.
On Thursday, the state released videos of the fatal shooting of Kohen Wiley, including Foster's body-worn camera footage of the June 14 encounter in a Walmart parking lot in Senatobia, about 40 miles (65 kilometers) south of Memphis, Tennessee.
Senatobia Mayor Greg Graves confirmed Foster’s resignation Friday.
Foster's attorney Martin Zummach declined to comment when reached Friday. Zummach has said Foster had ‘no choice’ but to fire his weapon at the vehicle because it was moving at him.
Kohen's mother, Vellesiya Wiley, has disputed that her friend, who was driving, headed toward the officers.
Videos show the fatal shooting in a Walmart parking lot
Ben Crump, an attorney for Kohen's family, said the footage shows the fatal shot came from the side of the car, disputing that Foster was in imminent danger. An independent autopsy commissioned by the family concluded the same. An image of the vehicle shows its shattered right front passenger window. The family’s legal team called for the federal government to investigate the shooting.
Van Turner, another attorney representing Kohen’s family, has called for Foster to be de-certified as a police officer.
“What we need is for him to be de-certified so that he’s not able to go to another police department and do the same thing,” Van Turner said during a news conference Thursday.
The Wiley family and legal team did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Foster's resignation on Friday.
Mississippi Department of Public Safety spokesperson Alex Gibert said Friday that Foster remained certified as a police officer.
Kohen would have celebrated his second birthday in early November.
The group of officers were at the Walmart store in response to an unrelated incident, according to a Mississippi Bureau of Investigation report. A Walmart employee then alerted them of two women running from the store.
The videos show Kohen’s mother, Vellesiya Wiley, holding Kohen as she and her friend run across the parking lot and enter their vehicle. Five officers approach the parked car with guns drawn. The car reverses away and crashes into a parked vehicle nearby as officers yell for it to stop.
The vehicle then accelerates forward as Foster steps toward it, directly in front, with his gun drawn. The wheels turn away from him, and he appears to put his hands on the hood as he jumps out of the way. He fires his gun, shattering the window of the front passenger side, where Kohen was seated on his mother’s lap. The car continues to drive away.
Vellesiya Wiley has denied that she and her friend stole diapers from the store and they have not been charged, according to state and county court records.
Former Senatobia officer was sued over alleged civil rights violations
Foster has worked for two other agencies in Mississippi since 2019 after becoming certified as a law enforcement officer there.
He worked for the police department in Southaven, a city in DeSoto County that’s part of the greater Memphis area, for two years and then was employed with the DeSoto County Sheriff’s Office until October 2024. About five months later, he was hired by the police department in Senatobia, a city of about 8,000, according to state records obtained by the AP.
A lawsuit filed in federal court in Mississippi in 2021 accused Foster and a group of 12 other Southaven police officers of civil rights violations during a 2019 arrest of two Black men outside a Waffle House. The two men said they had been searching for a lost set of keys when they were violently arrested and beaten by several officers.
They alleged that Foster submitted a report falsely stating that they tried to run over another officer with their vehicle. Foster and the others officers denied wrongdoing. The Southaven police department agreed to settle the case in 2022 for an undisclosed amount, court records show.
Last month, Senatobia Police Chief Harold Vanderford was fired by the city’s board of aldermen, after reporting by The New York Times, Mississippi Today and Verite News alleged he used racist slurs in private text messages.
