A police officer involved in a shooting in Mississippi that left 1-year-old Kohen Wiley dead is now on administrative leave.
Officials in Senatobia, Mississippi, about 36 miles north of Memphis, Tennessee, said the officer with the Senatobia Police Department was put on administrative leave.
The shooting occurred when police were called to the Senatobia Walmart on Sunday for a report of shoplifting. It led to officers “discharging their firearms,” the department said on Facebook.
The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation is leading an investigation into the shooting.
The state detective agency said that Kohen, his mother and another woman got into a car after leaving Walmart. The driver of the car drove towards police and nearly hit a police car. The officer opened fire on the car, the agency told The Associated Press.
The two women drove away after shots were fired and went to a nearby hospital where Kohen was pronounced dead, according to WMC-TV.
Kohen’s mother, who was not named, was unharmed following the shooting, but the other adult present was seriously injured, community advocate Marquell Bridges told the AP.
The Tate County Sheriff’s Office said that some of its deputies were also on scene to investigate a separate report when their assistance was requested, and specified that “an officer” was the one to open fire.
A man who witnessed the incident but did not provide his name told WREG-TV that the police were in the Walmart parking lot when the group exited, with one woman holding Kohen and the other holding a box of diapers. He also said there were two gunshots fired.
The Wiley family and the two women are questioning why the police felt the need to open fire.
“Policeman shot, opened fire in a public setting, over allegedly some Pampers. Whatever the incident may have come to, it still didn’t need for you to shoot two adults and a baby that was not even a threat to you,” Licole Wiley, the boy’s grandmother and sister of the critically injured woman, told WMC-TV.
The family has retained the services of civil rights attorney Ben Crump.
“A 1-year-old child is dead because police officers in Mississippi opened fire on a car in a crowded Walmart parking lot. Kohen Wiley was a baby. 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. They fired anyway, leading to the death of an innocent 1-year-old,” Mr. Crump said in a statement.
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