When Marquell Bridges appeared for our interview, he was wearing a T-shirt bearing the face of a smiling baby.
Above the photograph were the words “Rest in Peace.”
The child was Kohen Kartier Wiley, a one-year-old boy killed on June 14, 2026, when a police officer fired into a car outside a Walmart in Senatobia, Mississippi.
Bridges, founder and president of the Building Bridges Coalition, has helped lead the community response to Kohen’s killing. Working alongside Kohen’s family, local organizers and Black Lives Matter Grassroots, the coalition is now calling for a nationwide boycott of Walmart.
The boycott is not limited to the Senatobia store. Bridges says it includes Walmart stores nationwide, Walmart’s website and delivery services, Sam’s Club and companies doing business through Walmart’s marketplace.
At the center of the campaign is a simple demand: Release the video.
“We want these families to have a right to see what happened,” Bridges told me. “They should not have to wait on the police narrative.”
Kohen was with his mother, 20-year-old Vellesiya “Punkin” Wiley, and a family friend, identified by Bridges as LaToya Farrell, when police responded to a reported shoplifting incident at the Walmart on U.S. Highway 51.
The disputed allegation involved baby clothing and a package of Pampers Easy Ups.
According to the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, officers attempted to stop the women as they were leaving in a vehicle. The agency alleged that the driver moved the car in the direction of the officers and nearly struck one of them. An officer then opened fire.
Kohen’s mother and community witnesses have given a sharply different account.
Wiley has said she was sitting in the front passenger seat with Kohen on her lap. She maintains that the vehicle was moving away from the officers, not toward them. According to Bridges, Wiley lifted her son so that police could see there was a baby inside the car.
“She showed the officer, ‘My son is in here,’” Bridges said. “And he still started shooting.”
Kohen was struck in the chest and killed. Farrell was shot in the arm and thigh and hospitalized with critical injuries. No officers were injured.
The official incident report released nearly a month later offered little clarity. The two-page document did not name the responding officers, say how many officers were present or explain how an alleged shoplifting call escalated into officers firing into a vehicle.
That absence of information is precisely why the video matters.
Walmart stores are heavily monitored. Cameras routinely record customers entering, shopping, checking out and walking through the parking lot.
The Senatobia store’s footage could help establish whether anything was taken, whether the women were confronted inside the store and what happened immediately before police opened fire.
Body-camera and dashboard-camera footage could show where the officers were positioned, which direction the car was moving and whether any officer was actually in danger.
Yet more than a month after Kohen’s killing, the crucial footage had not been released publicly.
Walmart told Mississippi Today that company policy allows it to share surveillance footage only with law enforcement while an incident is under investigation. The company says it is cooperating with the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation.
That policy is one of the primary targets of the boycott.
Bridges argues that automatically handing evidence to police while denying it to the injured parties creates a fundamentally unequal system—especially when the police themselves may be responsible for the harm.
“That is not equality. That is not transparency,” he said. “We want these families to have the opportunity to build their platform and their fight for accountability.”
Walmart’s public website provides a formal process through which law enforcement agencies can request company records and surveillance evidence. It does not provide a comparable process for the people recorded in that footage or for families whose loved ones are killed on Walmart property.
That leaves grieving families dependent upon the very institutions whose conduct is being questioned.
During our conversation, Bridges identified Senatobia Police Sgt. Hunter Foster as the officer who fired into the vehicle.
That claim has been made repeatedly by organizers and community members. Public records have confirmed that Foster was one of the officers present and that he was placed on administrative leave two days after the shooting.
Authorities, however, have not publicly confirmed that Foster fired the fatal shots—or whether other officers also discharged their weapons. That distinction remains important until the video, ballistics evidence or an official investigative finding establishes who fired.
To read the full story go to: LA Progressive
Critical new information
“Mississippi Today” reports that Officer Dexter Smith, a Black Senatobia officer, filed an internal complaint alleging that Foster referred to him as a “Black motherfucker” inside the police station on June 12—two days before the Walmart shooting. Smith said Foster repeated the remark and that two other officers were present. Smith later resigned, saying the department had failed to meaningfully investigate his complaint even though the booking room reportedly had audio and video surveillance. Foster and the department did not respond to the publication’s requests for comment.
The article also reports that Foster was placed on leave two days after Kohen’s killing and that records mistakenly released by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation listed Foster as the subject of its investigation. However, no law-enforcement agency has publicly confirmed that Foster fired the fatal shots. BLM Grassroots identifies him as the shooter, but in a news interview that statement should still be attributed to the organization unless additional evidence is presented.
An equally significant Mississippi Today investigation published July 17 found that Foster had previously been accused in a federal lawsuit of exaggerating a vehicle threat during a 2019 Waffle House parking-lot encounter. Foster reportedly wrote that a driver accelerated and nearly ran over an officer, but surveillance footage reviewed by Mississippi Today showed no officer in front of the vehicle. Foster denied knowingly submitting an inaccurate report, and the lawsuit was settled confidentially. The similarity to the current claim—that Kohen’s vehicle nearly struck an officer—is impossible to ignore.
