Officer who fatally shot Mississippi toddler resigns after body-camera video release

The Mississippi police sergeant who fatally shot 1-year-old Kohen Wiley in a Walmart parking lot in June has resigned, five days after the state attorney general cleared him of wrongdoing and one day after investigators released body-camera video of the shooting. Hours later, the small city's interim police chief resigned too, the second departure in a single day from a department already under scrutiny over the case.

Sgt. Hunter Foster, 33, turned in his badge and service weapon on Friday, Senatobia Mayor Greg Graves confirmed. His attorney, Martin Zummach, said Foster "resigned for the good of the city and the police department and to permit the process of healing." The attorney general's office had announced on Oct. 19 that it would not charge Foster, saying in a written statement that his use of force in the June 14 shooting "was justified."

Kohen died at a hospital after Foster fired into a car driven by a friend of his mother, Vellesiya Wiley, as officers responded to a report of shoplifting at a Senatobia Walmart. The friend, who has not been publicly named, was critically injured; Kohen's mother was not physically hurt. Officers from the Senatobia Police Department and the Tate County Sheriff's Office had converged on the two women and the toddler as they ran from the store, according to the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, which led the inquiry; newly released body-camera video shows five officers approaching with weapons drawn. State investigators said the car reversed into a parked vehicle and then moved toward officers before Foster fired, striking it from the side.

A disputed account in a Walmart parking lot

Senatobia is a city of roughly 8,300 people and the seat of Tate County, about 40 miles south of Memphis, Tennessee. The Mississippi Department of Public Safety released body-camera and surveillance footage of the shooting on Thursday, a day after a partial version had already leaked to a local outlet. The family's attorneys, Ben Crump and Van Turner, said the footage, combined with an independent autopsy they commissioned, showed the fatal shot struck Kohen from the side of the car rather than from the front, undercutting the state's account that the vehicle was bearing down on officers.

Wiley's mother has disputed the official version from the beginning. In a video released by her lawyers days after the shooting, she said the group had gone to Walmart for diapers, that her friend was only briefly stopped while leaving the store, and that she tried to show officers there was a baby in the back seat as they approached with weapons drawn. No criminal charges have been filed against either woman.

A department already under strain

The resignation lands on a police department that was already in turmoil over the case. Senatobia's elected board fired Police Chief Harold Vanderford on Sept. 1 after reporters found he had used racist language in private text messages over the preceding year; the board rejected his resignation and voted instead to terminate him, installing Lt. Angelica Maze as interim chief. Mississippi Today has also reported that Foster himself was twice accused of directing racially offensive remarks at Black colleagues in the year before the shooting, including an incident two days before Kohen was killed, without apparent discipline.

Maze's resignation on Friday makes her the second police leader to leave the small department this year over fallout from the case. City officials named Lamorris Hampton, previously second-in-command, as the new interim chief. An alderman, Demetrius Garrett, said at a specially called board meeting that residents deserved an explanation. "People just don't leave a job for any reason," he said. "You have to have a reason, and I was here to find out the reason."

• June 14, 2026: Kohen Wiley, 1, is fatally shot by an officer during a Walmart shoplifting call in Senatobia.
• Sept. 1, 2026: Police Chief Harold Vanderford is fired over racist text messages.
• Oct. 19, 2026: The Mississippi attorney general's office finds the shooting justified and declines to file charges.
• Oct. 22-23, 2026: Body-camera footage is released; Sgt. Hunter Foster and interim Chief Angelica Maze both resign.

Family calls resignation insufficient

Kohen's family, represented by Ben Crump's law firm, rejected Foster's resignation as any kind of accountability. Crump said the departure does nothing to resolve the underlying dispute over what the video shows.

"Officer Foster's resignation is hardly a step toward accountability, and it is certainly not justice," Crump said. "Turning in a badge does not erase responsibility for taking a life."

A spokesperson for the Mississippi Department of Public Safety said Friday that Foster remains a certified law enforcement officer in the state despite his resignation from Senatobia, meaning he could, in theory, be hired by another agency. The family's legal team said it wants the state's police-certification board to revoke that credential and plans to ask the Department of Justice to open a federal civil-rights investigation, according to NBC News and an Associated Press report. Zummach, Foster's attorney, has said his client had "no choice" but to fire because the car was moving toward him, and that he did not know shoplifting suspects were in the vehicle or that a child was inside.

Foster previously worked for the Southaven Police Department and the DeSoto County Sheriff's Office. He was named in a 2021 federal lawsuit over a 2019 arrest at a Waffle House in Southaven, which that city settled in 2022 for an undisclosed amount, according to Memphis's Action News 5, which has covered the case extensively from just across the state line.

What comes next

No criminal charges are expected against Foster or any other officer; the attorney general's finding, issued under Section 45-1-6 of the Mississippi Code after the state bureau's investigation, closes the state's criminal review of the shooting itself. That leaves the family's options narrower and slower: a possible civil lawsuit, a petition to decertify Foster, and an appeal to federal authorities who have made no public commitment to intervene. The Senatobia Board of Aldermen, which must now find a second permanent police chief this year, has not said when it will begin that search or whether it will address the community's broader complaints about the department's handling of Black residents, concerns that local reporting says predate Kohen's death.