Hunter Foster, the Senatobia, Mississippi, police officer who shot and killed one-year-old Kohen Wiley in a Walmart parking lot on 14 June, has resigned from the police department. The board of aldermen accepted his resignation on 21 October, effective immediately. Foster had been on leave since 16 June. The facts of the shooting are now visible on body-camera and surveillance footage released by the Mississippi department of public safety. Officers ran out of a Walmart after an employee reported shoplifters fleeing. Within seconds, Foster drew his weapon and fired three shots at a vehicle containing Kohen, his mother, and another woman. He struck and injured the driver and killed the toddler, who died in his mother's arms. Several other officers drew their weapons but did not fire. The alleged crime that precipitated the police response: stealing diapers. Neither Kohen's mother nor her companion has been charged with any offense. The state's response to the killing itself was delivered earlier this week by Attorney General Lynn Fitch, who declared the shooting "justified." Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, representing Kohen's family, held a press conference Thursday calling for a federal investigation and for Foster's decertification — a measure that would prevent him from serving as a law enforcement officer anywhere in the country. "The bullet that killed Kohen Wiley was not justified," Crump said. "This decision sends a message that a Black baby boy, his life, is not as valuable as the white diapers that he is wrapped in." Resignation is not accountability. Without decertification, Foster is free to be hired by another department in another jurisdiction — a well-documented pattern in American policing known as "wandering officers." The AG's "justified" determination effectively closes the state-level criminal path. The only remaining avenue for criminal accountability is a federal civil rights investigation, which carries a significantly higher evidentiary bar. The structural pattern is familiar and deeply extractive: lethal force deployed over a property crime allegation involving goods worth a few dollars, directed at a vehicle containing a child, with the costs borne entirely by the family and the Black community while institutional actors — the officer, the department, the attorney general — absorb nothing. The officer exits quietly. The department avoids a termination fight. The AG provides legal cover. The family buries a child who would have turned two on 1 November. Kohen Wiley's killing is not an isolated incident but a data point in a systemic pattern where the threshold for lethal force against Black Americans remains catastrophically low, especially when the institutional review mechanisms are controlled by the same system that produced the force in the first place.
