Mississippi investigators said the shooting was “justified,” but new body camera footage shows the cop firing into the passenger’s side as the car passed by him. The post Bodycam: Cop Was Not in Danger When He Fired Shots That Killed 1-Year-Old Kohen Wiley appeared first on The Intercept .
Page A220From§Eachthe afternoon edition — 23 October 2026
Mississippi rules shooting of baby 'justified,' bodycam contradicting it surfaces days later, officer resigns uncharged
As it ran on the front
Was the officer in danger when he fired? I already know the answer to that one. Give me a second, I had it written down somewhere... here it is. That's not my line. That's the bodycam footage, out this week from Mississippi's own department of public safety.
Now go back four months, before any of us had seen that tape. Mississippi's attorney general, Lynn Fitch, had her office put out a statement. I wrote the word down at the time because I wanted to be sure I had it right. "Justified." That's what her office called the shooting of a one-year-old boy, Kohen Wiley, who was sitting in his mother's lap in a Walmart parking lot in Senatobia. That was a Monday, the nineteenth.…
…(cont) Here's where I have to keep going back, so bear with me, because I think it matters what order things happened in. On June 14th, officers in Senatobia responded to a shoplifting call at that Walmart — CBS News has it as an allegation over stolen diapers. An officer, later named as Hunter Foster, fired at a moving vehicle. The baby died in his mother's arms. Foster was put on leave two days later, June 16th. Then four months went by. Then the ruling came down. Then, within days of the ruling, the department released the footage.
I want to show you something, and I promise it won't take long — the car in my driveway barely starts most mornings, but it starts enough for this. You ever sit at a toll plaza and watch the car ahead of you in the next lane? There's a window where that car is right there beside the booth, close enough to clip whoever's standing at it. And there's a window after, where the car's already gone past, already rolling, taillights shrinking. A person standing at that booth isn't in danger from a car that has already gone by. I'm not the one saying that. The bodycam is saying that — it shows the vehicle with Kohen Wiley inside already alongside the officer, already moving past him, when the shots went into the passenger's side.
So which window was Officer Foster in when he fired? I don't have to answer that one. The tape already did: passenger's side, already passing.
The family's lawyer had a line I wrote down because it was put so plainly: an allegation of shoplifting "does not warrant the death" of a child. I don't have anything in my notes where the attorney general's office disputes the diapers, or the shoplifting, or any of it. What I have in my notes is the word that got disputed once the tape came out, and I'll get to that.
On October 21st, the Senatobia board of aldermen accepted Hunter Foster's resignation. Effective immediately. No charges were filed against him. Not one. Four months of a ruling stood on its own, before the public ever saw a frame of the tape that contradicts it — and now the officer is gone from the department, and does anybody go back and reopen the file once the tape disagrees with it? I don't have that written down anywhere, because as of this morning, nobody has.
Wait — hold on, one more thing before you go to print with this. The tape came out after the ruling. The ruling is still on the books. The officer who fired it is no longer employed, and the shooting he's no longer employed over was never charged as anything — it was only ever called one thing, back on a Monday in October, before a single person outside that building had seen where those shots actually went. Justified.
“They had the tape the whole time they called it justified — that's not an investigation, that's a press release with a four-month head start on the truth. A cop fires into a car that's already past him, kills a baby, and the only consequence on paper is a resignation that leaves the word "justified" sitting in the file untouched. That's the whole racket: the ruling comes first, the evidence comes later, and by the time the public catches up there's nobody left to charge.”
“Look, the attorney general's office did its job the way it's designed — they investigated, they found the use of force justified, that's the process working. Nobody's office goes back and reopens a finding just because a video shows up later, that's not how— okay, that's actually exactly how it should work if the video contradicts the finding. I didn't say that. The resignation speaks for itself, and it speaks for itself without anyone having to call it anything.”
The receipts
The Mississippi attorney general's office had determined that the use of force was justified in the deadly shooting that stemmed from an alleged shoplifting incident.
The family lawyer says an allegation of shoplifting "does not warrant the death" of a child.
Hunter Foster fired at vehicle during a shoplifting call at a Walmart, killing one-year-old Kohen Wiley Hunter Foster, the Mississippi police officer who shot into a vehicle and killed one-year-old Kohen Wiley, has resigned from the Senatobia police department. Earlier this week, Mississippi’s attorney general, Lynn Fitch, announced that…
· 'Mississippi Goddam': State AG Calls Police Killing of Toddler Kohen Wiley 'Justified' from the morgue, 19 Oct 2026
· Mississippi attorney general says officer was justified in shooting that killed 1-year-old Kohen Wiley from the morgue, 20 Oct 2026
· Mississippi attorney general rules fatal police shooting of one-year-old as ‘justified’ from the morgue, 19 Oct 2026
· Family seeks answers after police officer who shot 1-year-old cleared of wrongdoing from the morgue, 20 Oct 2026
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