Mississippi releases video showing fatal shooting of 1-year-old boy by police officer

Mississippi released video Thursday showing the fatal shooting of a 1-year-old boy by a police officer whom state authorities have cleared of criminal wrongdoing.Kohen Wiley was killed in June when Senatobia police officer Sgt. Hunter Foster fired his gun into a moving vehicle while responding to a shoplifting call. Kohen’s family says footage of the fatal encounter shows the shooting was not justified.The Mississippi Attorney General’s office said this week its monthlong probe found that Foster’s use of force was appropriate.

Foster’s attorney, Martin Zummach, has said his client had “no choice” but to shoot at the vehicle because it was going to hit him.Ben Crump, a civil rights attorney representing Kohen’s family, said Foster was not in danger when he fired the shot that killed the 1-year-old. Crump said the video shows Foster fired that shot from the passenger side of the car.Kohen's close relatives watched the footage shot during the June 14 encounter in a Walmart parking lot in Senatobia, about 40 miles (65 kilometers) south of Memphis, Tennessee. The video included footage from the camera worn by the officer who shot and killed Kohen.Kohen would have celebrated his second birthday in early November, civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is representing Kohen’s family, said during a news conference Thursday.“The word ‘justified’ has haunted me,” Kohen's maternal grandmother, Veronica Roberson, said during the news conference.

“There’s no justification for that.”Roberson said she found out from reading the news that the state had cleared the officer, and she also saw parts of the video that had been leaked online Wednesday. She called the lack of notice from the attorney general's office and the leak of the footage a “slap in the face” to her family.Video shows multiple angles of the fatal encounterThe Mississippi Department of Public Safety on Thursday released footage showing the shooting from the body-worn cameras of multiple law enforcement officers, including Foster. Darkhorse Press, a Mississippi crime and community news outlet with a focus on law enforcement, posted some of that footage on its website a day earlier.

The organization’s founder, Therese Apel, is formerly the department's communications director.The videos show Kohen's mother Vellesiya Wiley, holding Kohen as she and her friend run across the parking lot and enter their vehicle. Mississippi has released video showing the fatal shooting of a 1-year-old boy by a police officer. Kohen Wiley was killed in June when Senatobia police officer Sgt.