Senatobia officer involved in fatal shooting of Black toddler was accused of making a racially offensive remark two days prior

By Mukta Joshi and Joseph Cranney, Verite News | Originally published by Mississippi Today

Mukta Joshi is an investigative reporter at Mississippi Today. She is spending a year as a New York Times Local Investigations fellow examining immigration and criminal justice issues. She can be reached at mukta.joshi@nytimes.com. Joseph Cranney is a reporter with the Deep South Today Investigative Reporting Center in collaboration with The New York Times. Learn more about the center’s work here.

SENATOBIA — A white police officer involved in last month’s shooting that killed a Black toddler and injured a Black woman directed a racially offensive remark toward a coworker two days prior, calling him a “Black motherfucker,” according to an internal department complaint reviewed by Mississippi Today.

Senatobia Police Sgt. Hunter Foster was placed on leave two days after the June 14 shooting at the local Walmart that killed 1-year-old Kohen Wiley, though no agency has confirmed if he fired his weapon. In records released by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation “in error,” Foster was listed as the subject of its investigation into the shooting. Law enforcement and Walmart have declined repeated requests to release video footage from the incident.

Late in the afternoon June 12, Foster entered the police department’s booking room where Officer Dexter Smith, who is Black, was completing some paperwork, according to Smith’s written complaint.

“Who is this Black motherfucker back there?” Foster said, according to the complaint. Smith, who wrote that he had almost no prior relationship with Foster, was taken aback, the complaint says.

“I replied that I had been in the sun from training all week and that I had tanned from the sun,” Smith wrote, adding that Foster repeated the remark and that two other officers overheard it.

“Upon Sergeant Foster making the extremely unprofessional remark, the room went silent and I printed my paperwork and left,” Smith wrote. “I have never had any one-on-one conversation with Sergeant Foster, nor do we have any outside relationship to be on a level for him to speak to me in that manner.”

Exactly a month after Smith submitted his complaint, he resigned from his position at the department, an email he sent to department and city leadership shows. The email, obtained by Mississippi Today, said his resignation was in part because of how the department handled his complaint. 

The complaint had not received “any meaningful response or resolution,” Smith’s email said, adding that it could have been “easily verified,” as the site of the incident was equipped with both audio and video surveillance. “The failure to review or consider this available evidence, combined with the disparity in how workplace issues have been addressed, has significantly influenced my decision to resign.”

When contacted by reporters, Smith declined to comment.

Foster, who is 32 and in his eighth year in law enforcement, didn’t respond to a request for comment. Mississippi Today notified Foster’s father, a retired law enforcement officer, of the allegations in Smith’s complaint, but he didn’t respond.

Lt. Shane Howell, a Senatobia police spokesperson, also didn’t respond to a request for comment sent Friday.

Foster and the police department have been subject to a firestorm of criticism in the month since the shooting at Walmart, which, besides killing the toddler, also injured 22-year-old Latoya Ferrell, who is Black. Ferrell had been accused of shoplifting a pack of diapers and baby clothes.

Kohen’s mother, Vellesiya Wiley, was holding Kohen in her arms in the front passenger seat next to Ferrell, who was driving.

Officers had attempted to stop the car, but “the driver drove in the direction of the officers, almost striking one,” according to a statement released the day of the shooting by MBI.

Ben Crump, a civil rights lawyer representing the Wiley family, hired a forensic pathologist who concluded that Kohen was struck by a bullet from at least an intermediate distance from the side, which Crump said was evidence that officers weren’t in harm’s way when they opened fire. 

Crump shared a photo showing the vehicle’s front passenger window was blown out. The photo also appears to show a bullet hole in the windshield on the passenger side

Foster was hired in Senatobia in March 2025 and promoted to sergeant six months later, city records show. He spent three years with the DeSoto County Sheriff’s Office and a little over two years with the Southaven Police Department prior to that. 

During his time in DeSoto, Foster was named as a defendant in a federal lawsuit alleging that he and other deputies used unreasonable force on a woman after a traffic stop, knocking out multiple teeth and breaking her jaw in three places. Foster’s attorney denied those allegations in court papers and a federal judge dismissed that suit in March.

In a separate lawsuit filed when he was an officer in Southaven, Foster was accused of exaggerating the risks that a car posed to officers during a suspicious vehicle call to a Waffle House parking lot in 2019.

In his report about that incident, Foster claimed that the driver had accelerated his car, “almost running over” another officer. Surveillance footage filed with the lawsuit shows no evidence that the car drove toward, or nearly hit, any of the officers. It shows several officers, though not Foster, aggressively pulling men from the car and striking them while they were on the ground. 

Katherine Kerby, a lawyer for the officers, wrote in her response to the lawsuit that Foster “denies the allegations as to him or that he had any knowledge that any aspects of his report were not accurate.”

Joseph Cranney reported from New Orleans.

This article was originally published by Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Source: Original Article