Tag: Justice

As Miguel Parra Hernandez, a Mexican national, was fleeing from U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement on foot last month, he turned into a parking lot. An unmarked government vehicle came screaming into the lot after him and struck him.

When a grand jury in Harris County, Texas, charged the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officer behind the wheel last week, the indictment pointed to a broader pattern in the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants and activists. The charge was assault with a deadly weapon; the weapon was the vehicle.

The Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, claimed Parra Hernandez ran in front of the government vehicle; surveillance footage of the incident shows him running away from the car moments before he is hit. (An attorney for the ICE officer accused of assault against Parra Hernandez told The Associated Press his client had not committed any crime.)

In the same month, an unmarked ICE vehicle speeding the wrong way down a one-way street in Long Beach, California, struck a bicycle ridden by Ricardo Gonzalez, whose daughter later said he was a U.S. citizen. An agent immediately drew their gun on Gonzalez, who was later hospitalized for his injuries. The government said the man was not struck, but video released by the New York Times showed the ICE vehicle swerving into the bicycle.

Three days later after the collision in Long Beach, Antonio Moreida stood in the street in Woodland, California, outside Sacramento, documenting an unmarked ICE vehicle when the black Chevy Tahoe accelerated toward him. When the SUV hit him, Moreida told a meeting at Woodland City Hall last week, he was knocked to the ground — and the driver of the Tahoe did not stop to check on him.

The Department of Homeland Security said Moreida jumped onto the hood of the unmarked car, but when video of the incident showed him standing in place, local police and the mayor publicly disputed ICE’s account.

Weaponized Vehicles

In the national conversation about ICE’s heavy-handed crackdown on immigrants across the country, much has been made of the Department of Homeland Security’s claims that immigrants and activists “weaponized” their vehicles against federal agents. After immigration officers shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who was targeted by ICE, and community defender Renée Good in separate incidents, the government said the civilians had used their cars to attack agents — allegations that have not been borne out in criminal charges, or were called into question by witness accounts and video analysis.

What happened to Parra Hernandez, Gonzalez, and Moreida, however, was the opposite of what the government said about Good and Salgado Araujo: It was ICE agents who weaponized their vehicles against civilians.

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As the Trump administration ramped up deportations over the last year, federal agents have effectively turned their cars into massive, deadly blunt objects. Common tactics, known collectively as “offensive driving techniques,” include ramming the cars of immigrant targets and activists; “brake-checking” volunteers trying to observe ICE activity; and, in some cases, outright driving into civilians. The Intercept reviewed two dozen cases of ICE using vehicles against civilians in these ways, including multiple incidents where victims were hospitalized or even died from their injuries.

“Vehicles are another tool ICE agents are using with unchecked force, just like their guns, Tasers, and pepper spray,” said Hannah Stauss, co-director of Hands Off NYC, a group that opposes ICE’s presence in New York City. “ICE’s deranged use of vehicles effectively weaponizes them against our immigrant neighbors and rapid responders, and will continue to kill people. We are witnessing in real time the results of a federal agency being allowed to operate with impunity, in secrecy, and with unfettered violence.”

In a statement to The Intercept that compiled past responses to the incidents in this article, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said, “ICE is instituting additional training including, crowd control measures, additional training for high-risk vehicle stops, a live-fire cover course for officer safety, and medical training.”

The spokesperson did not respond specifically to allegations about the incident involved Parra Hernandez; said Gonzalez was not struck by an ICE car; and blamed Moreida for the accident because he was in the roadway.

“Offensive Driving Techniques”

In federal policies and memos, the maneuvers used in the incidents reviewed by The Intercept, along with testimony from rapid responders, are referred to by federal agents as “offensive driving techniques.” They are part of a wider patten of aggressive driving by law enforcement officers across the country, but especially by federal agents with little accountability and nearly blanket backing from the Trump administration.

Last October, Leo Martinez was monitoring immigrations agents’ activity as a volunteer with VC Defensa, a community defense group in Ventura County, California, when an unmarked ICE car rammed his pickup truck. ICE agents arrested Martinez and later released him without charge.

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In March, they did it again: Three unmarked government vehicles rammed Martinez’s car as he sought to reverse away from them. The federal agents broke his window and dragged him out. Martinez, who was hospitalized from his injuries, was again released without charge. (The Department of Homeland Security spokesperson did not respond specifically to questions about the incidents involving Martinez.)

“They run stop signs, red lights, they’ll cut off complete intersections, and they rarely turn on their lights,” Martinez told The Intercept. “They’ll slam on their brakes in the middle of the freeway, in the middle of the street. Sometimes they’ll do sudden U-turns in the middle of nowhere and cut off traffic in both directions.”

When activists are monitoring federal agents, one of the most common ways for ICE to leverage their vehicles as physical threats is the “brake check,” a move where a car suddenly breaks to cause the car behind it to slow down — or slam into its rear bumper.

“Brake-checking” doesn’t appear in official guidelines as an “offensive driving technique” with good reason: It is considered to be illegal in all 50 states, covered by various statutes like reckless driving or other anti-road-rage laws. Yet VC Defensa volunteers, who like Martinez monitor ICE activity, said that when they follow ICE vehicles to alert the community with horn-honking, they keep a distance of two to three car lengths because federal agents so frequently brake-check volunteers.

Federal agents use “offensive driving techniques” so often in Ventura County that VC Defensa volunteers sometimes identify the unmarked cars by the body damage that characterizes them.

Customs and Border Protection, another agency that, like ICE, is under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security, expanded its agents’ discretion and ability to use these techniques during abduction operations after President Donald Trump took office for a second term.

A previous 2023 Customs and Border Protection pursuit policy largely prohibited officers from boxing in vehicles or making vehicle contact with another vehicle in motion. A partially redacted 2025 CBP directive gives officers broader discretion to use offensive driving techniques and ignore traffic laws.

“Most federal agencies are not well trained in police-citizen interactions, traffic stops, and pursuits,” said Geoffrey Alpert, a criminology and criminal justice professor at the University of South Carolina who helped Customs and Border Protection rewrite their car-chase policy under the Biden and Obama administrations.

In December, ICE agents in Elgin, Illinois, chased a Venezuelan man until his car and the ICE vehicles crashed. State investigators found the ICE agents likely conducted an “unskilled precious immobilization technique (‘PIT maneuver’) and lost control of the vehicle.” (The Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said the target of the raid rammed an ICE vehicle into a tree.)

In January, Christian Molina, a U.S. citizen, was preparing to pull over for an ICE traffic stop in Minneapolis when the agents rammed the back of his car, injuring his back. The agents said they would pay for the damage, but left without providing contact information. (The Department of Homeland Security spokesperson did not respond specifically to questions about the incident involving Molina.)

In June, agents conducted a high-speed chase through a residential neighborhood of Chicago, blowing through intersections until finally ramming their target’s car. (The Department of Homeland Security spokesperson blamed the target of the immigration enforcement action for the accident because he fled from ICE.)

“It’s disheartening to see some sort of federal agents or law enforcement driving so aggressively in a residential area,” one neighbor told Block Club Chicago. “I have a kid who’s two and we go out for walks all the time. We could have been crossing the street when they came through the intersection.”

High-Speed Chases

Following the killings of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in July, the Department of Homeland Security ordered a temporary halt to traffic stops.

The day the directive was issued, ICE chased a group of roofers in Texas, blowing through a stop sign and over a speed bump without sirens. A mother driving her son to the theater was forced to swerve into a ditch to avoid a collision.

“They speeded right next to me,” the mother told the Texas Observer. “They hit the speed bump so bad that, when they got in front of me at high speed, I had to go to the right.”

If she had not swerved, she said, “they would have hit me.”

Some of these car chases have turned deadly in the very places where local police are restricted from chasing suspects because of the attendant dangers.

In February, agents undertook a high-speed chase in pursuit of Oscar Vasquez Lopez outside of Savannah, Georgia. Vasquez Lopez’s car struck a teacher, killing her.

The Savannah Police Department only allows pursuits when the suspect has committed or is attempting to commit a forcible felony, and the risk of not capturing someone outweighs the risk of the chase. Vasquez Lopez had no criminal record, only a civil deportation order from 2024.

Two immigration car chases in New Jersey, where police face similar restrictions at the statewide level, resulted in hospitalizations. (In the Texas case, the Georgia case, and the New Jersey case, the Department of Homeland Security spokesperson blamed the target of the immigration actions for causing unsafe conditions by fleeing.)

“They are not required to follow local agency policies (the same as other agencies), but they must be held responsible for their actions under state and federal law,” Alpert, the criminology professor, said. “The failure to evaluate these behaviors in a full, complete and transparent manner leaves us all in the dark.”

Earlier this month, the AP reported on an internal memo to ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division that banned agents from conducting high-speed car chases. The directive still allows trained agents to make traffic stops and undertake offensive driving maneuvers.

Ramming Pedestrians

ICE agents’ vehicles are not just recklessly pursuing and ramming vehicles driven by who they thought were targets for immigration enforcement. In multiple filmed interactions, agents have driven into pedestrian rapid responders and protesters.

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In Woodland, California, ICE agents crashed into Moreida as he sought to collect their license plate information. After a major workplace raid in Los Angeles in June 2025, a news helicopter filmed the moment a protester walked in front of several ICE vehicles. One slowly sped up until it knocked him to the ground.

“It’s a disproportionate use of force. An individual is not going to win a fight with a vehicle,” Alpert, the criminology professor, said. “I’ve never seen any state or local law enforcement ever use a vehicle properly to hit or to run into a civilian.”

In other incidents, federal agents have weaponized their vehicles against crowds of activists. (Asked about the protests incidents mentioned in this article, the Department of Homeland Security spokesperson blamed “anti-ICE agitators.”)

In the aftermath of an ICE shooting this month in the New York City neighborhood of Marble Hill, immigration agents were seeking to move a man with a gunshot wound — whose car, with his 5-year-old son in the back, smashed into a concrete barrier during the incident — from a hospital to a detention facility. As government vehicles left the hospital in a speeding caravan, a bicycle was nearly hit by an federal agent in a black vehicle, which honked its horn, according to video of the incident. In another social media post, an ICE agent in an unmarked vehicle continued driving even with six protesters walking in front of it.

In July 2025, in San Francisco, after ICE clashed with protesters while moving detainees from the immigration courthouse to unmarked vehicles, several protesters clung to the hood of the car until they were physically thrown off when the vehicle sharply accelerated.

“I absolutely worry about ICE agents hurting people or killing people with these aggressive driving maneuvers,” said a New York rapid responder. “In order to avoid having their movements in vehicles documented, ICE agents will dramatically accelerate far beyond safe speeds for a dense urban environment like New York City.”

The organizer, who requested anonymity to avoid retaliation from the government, reported that agents drive at high speeds into oncoming traffic, run red lights, and abruptly turn without signaling. They rarely use emergency lights or sirens. These tactics align with the pattern of behavior described by Martinez in California — but in a city where rapid responders and neighbors are more often on foot or riding bicycles, not in their own vehicles.

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When ICE agents brought a detainee to a Brooklyn hospital after a violent arrest in May, hundreds protested outside the hospital. One TikTok video from the night captured the moment an unmarked ICE vehicle drove into several gathered people, accelerating sharply until they leapt out of the way.

“Given the frequency with which these agents are engaging in aggressive maneuvers to try and lose rapid responders or prevent documentation of their movements,” the organizer said, “it is honestly only a matter of time until an ICE agent seriously injuries or kills a cyclist or pedestrian in New York City.”

Source: The Intercept · 2026-11-02

Alabama attorney Larry Grissett was checking Facebook in late September when he saw a news story about a man he represented in a murder trial more than 40 years ago. According to the article, a federal judge had just vacated the conviction of that client, Charles McCrory.

Grissett was stunned. He later summed up his reaction: “Vindication.”

McCrory was 26 years old when he was accused of brutally killing his wife in the small town of Andalusia. He insisted he was innocent — and Grissett believed him. There was no evidence connecting McCrory to the crime; prosecutors seized on a supposed bite mark found on his wife’s body, which a state expert claimed to match to McCrory’s teeth.

Grissett was never convinced by the so-called bite mark. At McCrory’s 1985 trial, he said, Grissett’s own dentist sat through the expert testimony and found it preposterous. “He says, ‘There’s no way that guy can say that,’ Grissett recalled. “I mean, anybody with common sense would know that.”

In a September 21 ruling describing the case against McCrory as “thin,” Trump-appointed Judge R. Austin Huffaker Jr., zeroed in on this junk forensic science. Not only would the alleged bite mark not be allowed into evidence today, Huffaker wrote, bite-mark analysis itself “is grossly unreliable and unsupported by relevant scientific bodies. It amounts to nothing more than rank speculation.”

Unless the state moves to retry him within the next six months, Huffaker concluded, McCrory must be released from prison.

The ruling was not only momentous for McCrory, who has insisted on his innocence for more than four decades, but it also marked a new victory in the long legal battle against junk forensics — and the discredited discipline of bite-mark analysis specifically.

Yet more than a month after the decision, McCrory remains behind bars with no sense of when he might walk out. Although his lawyers asked the court to free him on bond pending the state’s decision to release or retry him, the Alabama attorney general’s office filed a motion last week asking Huffaker to reconsider his order overturning the conviction. The state’s appeals will likely drag out McCrory’s ordeal through the holidays and into next year.

In a statement, McCrory’s current legal team praised Huffaker’s “explicit acknowledgment that criminal convictions based on discredited bitemark evidence cannot stand.” Mark Loudon-Brown, senior attorney at the Southern Center for Human Rights, and Chris Fabricant, director of strategic litigation for the Innocence Project, said they are “grateful for the decision and look forward to continuing our fight to bring Mr. McCrory home.”

In 2022, The Intercept published a lengthy investigation into McCrory’s case, detailing the flaws in the state’s conviction. The case attracted additional media coverage, highlighting the problem of junk forensic science. Despite the glaring problems with the evidence against McCrory, Alabama courts have routinely rejected his appeals and in 2023, the state’s parole board denied McCrory release.

Julie Bond McCrory’s body was found inside her home in Andalusia on May 31, 1985. Her head was bashed in, and she’d been repeatedly stabbed in the chest. The couple’s son Chad, then 3 years old, was found unharmed in his bed. Police quickly pointed to McCrory as their only suspect: He and Julie were separated, and McCrory had been having an affair. At trial, the theory seemed to be that he’d savagely murdered Julie to be free from her.

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The police investigation was cursory at best. Detectives found no physical evidence to connect McCrory to the bloody crime. Meanwhile, they ignored some evidence altogether, including two windows in Julie’s bedroom that were found open, but which investigators failed to dust for fingerprints. Police also failed to consider an alternate suspect, a man who worked at an excavating company bordering the McCrorys’ backyard and who, just weeks after Julie’s murder, committed a home invasion rape of another local woman. He was convicted and sent to prison for that crime. 

Ultimately, the state latched onto a single piece of physical evidence against McCrory: a pair of small indentations on the back of Julie’s right arm, which prosecutors concluded was a bite mark made by McCrory’s teeth.

To sell this theory, the state employed famed forensic dentist Richard Souviron, a star prosecution witness in the recent and sensational trial of serial killer Ted Bundy. Although Souviron initially said he couldn’t definitively link the two marks on Julie’s arm to McCrory’s teeth, at trial he was unequivocal that they matched.

Bite-mark analysis is based on a two-pronged foundation. First, that the shape and arrangement of our teeth are unique, like DNA, and second, that skin is a suitable substrate for recording this uniqueness. As it turns out, there’s no science backing either assertion. In fact, research into the discipline has routinely found the opposite — that human dentition is not unique and that skin, with its malleability, is a terrible medium for accurately recording any injury. This makes bite-mark analysis a random and entirely speculative practice.

Still, after taking center stage at the Bundy trial, bite-mark analysis took off in the 1980s and ’90s and, despite not having any basis in actual science, made its way into courtrooms around the country, turning forensic dentists like Souviron into newsmaking, swashbuckling crime fighters.

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In the years that followed, however, bite-mark analysis was increasingly called into question and ultimately exposed as junk science, a subjective pattern-matching practice that has led to dozens of wrongful convictions. At least four of those, including McCrory’s, are cases in which Souviron served as the prosecution’s expert.

In 2019, Souviron recanted his testimony in McCrory’s case, providing an affidavit to Fabricant and Loudon-Brown, who presented it at a 2021 evidentiary hearing in Andalusia. “As a forensic odontologist I no longer believe the individualized teeth marks comparison testimony I offered in his case was reliable or proper,” Souviron wrote. “I no longer believe, as I did at the time of trial, that there is a valid scientific basis for concluding that the injury found on the skin of the victim in this case, assuming that the injury is in fact teeth marks, could be ‘matched’ or otherwise connected to a specific individual, such as Mr. McCrory.”

Despite the fact that their key witness had disavowed the evidence they used to send McCrory to prison for life, prosecutors fought to preserve their conviction. At the 2021 hearing, they insisted that McCrory was guilty, based on the same evidence they presented at trial. They recast the supposed bite mark as “teeth marks,” implying that, while bite-mark analysis may be discredited, the study of “teeth marks” is a separate and valid discipline. Even if Souviron had not testified for the state, they argued, jurors could have looked at photos of the marks on Julie’s body and the dental molds taken from McCrory and decided for themselves that McCrory inflicted the wounds.

Covington County Circuit Court Judge Lex Short, who presided over the hearing, agreed with the prosecutor. So did the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, which upheld his ruling in favor of the state. But Huffaker did not.

Huffaker took exception to the notion that analyzing “teeth marks” is somehow separate from bite-mark analysis. It is clear, he wrote, “that bitemark identification is based on analysis of individual teeth markings.”

But “most importantly, the state court unreasonably determined that, even without Dr. Souviron’s expert testimony, a reasonable jury could compare the bitemark evidence with McCrory’s dentition themselves and find that it belonged to McCrory,” Huffaker wrote. “This finding blinks reality in light of the evidence presented by McCrory at the postconviction evidentiary hearing.” In a footnote, he added that “if an expert could not testify about bitemark identification because it is junk science, a jury should not have been allowed to consider it either.”

McCrory is not the only person who is still fighting for his freedom decades after being convicted based on discredited junk science. Last year, Chris Duncan was declared innocent nearly 30 years after being sent to Louisiana’s death row based on bogus bite-mark evidence. He was released one day before Thanksgiving. In his case, a video showed the state’s supposed bite-mark expert manufacturing the evidence that was used to convict Duncan.

As in McCrory’s case, Louisiana prosecutors have nevertheless continued to insist their case against Duncan is solid. And as in McCrory’s case, this has not gone over well with some judges. Earlier this year, Louisiana Supreme Court Chief Judge John Weimer wrote that bite-mark evidence “should be discarded and no longer have a place in the realm of forensic science.”

“Long ago, some who were thought to have the best and brightest minds of that time endorsed ‘trial by water’ as a means of determining a person’s guilt or innocence. We now look back at those practices as asinine and absurd, since those who fell victim to those practices often did not survive, regardless of whether they were found guilty or innocent,” Weimer wrote. “Thankfully, as scientific knowledge evolved, there was a realization that these practices had no basis whatsoever in logic, reason, or the search for truth, and the practices were discarded.”

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As the holidays approach, McCrory’s family remains hopeful that he will soon walk out of prison. His son Chad, who is now in his 40s, has attended a dozen parole hearings with the hope of one day seeing his father released.

Grissett, McCrory’s former lawyer, reached out to Chad to share his hope that McCrory will finally come home. While memories have faded in the tight-knit community of Andalusia, many people remember McCrory’s case, he said.

“Everybody sees this was junk science,” Grissett said. “You don’t have to be a scientist to understand that.”

It’s “sad that it’s taken this long,” Grissett said. It haunts him that “somebody’s still out there who murdered this lady. And I’m afraid that they’re not gonna look into that.”

Source: The Intercept · 2026-10-28

After the Mississippi attorney general cleared a white cop for firing into a car and killing a Black toddler in a Walmart parking lot, video footage released by the Mississippi Department of Public Safety has revealed the fullest picture to date of what happened.

The videos, provided to The Intercept in response to a public records request, come on the heels of leaked footage that exposed how a needlessly aggressive and reckless police confrontation of two suspected shoplifters led to 1-year-old Kohen Wiley’s violent death in his mother’s arms.

While the newly released videos include redacted versions of the previously leaked footage — including body camera footage for some of the officers, as well as Walmart surveillance video — the new footage reveals for the first time the body camera video belonging to the Senatobia police officer who fired the shots that killed Kohen Wiley: Sgt. Hunter Foster.

While the state concluded that the shooting was “justified” based on a probe by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, the videos show how police escalated a non-life-threatening situation — one that could have ended with a mere shoplifting charge — by pursuing Kohen’s mother, Vel’lesiya Wiley, and the driver, Latoya Ferrell, after they ran from the store and tried to drive away.

Foster’s body camera footage makes clear that he positioned himself in front of the vehicle, aimed his gun at the car, and fired the fatal shot into the passenger side window after the car was moving past him and posed no threat.

This is consistent with the conclusions of Dr. Roger Mitchell, a forensic pathologist hired by Kohen Wiley’s family, who determined in June that the fatal bullet was most likely fired into the side window, entering his small body on his right side and exiting his left.

The release also includes a 10-page, heavily redacted investigative report by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, which the state attorney general relied upon in concluding that the shooting was justified.

The report’s narrative is misleading: Its only description of the shooting is that one officer “discharged his firearm” after the car “sped toward the officers.” The report does not discuss the fact that the firing officer was beside the car when he first fired, which is clear in Foster’s body camera footage. The report also redacts Kohen Wiley’s cause of death.

Foster resigned from the Senatobia police department on Wednesday. Afterward, Foster’s lawyer told CNN, “The driver of the vehicle was attempting to kill those 5 officers, and Hunter Foster had no choice but to discharge his weapon.” (Neither Foster nor his lawyer responded to The Intercept’s requests for comment.)

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Residents of Senatobia had called for months for the body camera footage and Walmart surveillance videos to be released. After the state attorney general announced that the police had been cleared, a spokesperson for the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, which houses the state’s Bureau of Investigations, told The Intercept that the videos would be released after the family had a chance to watch them.

Instead, as with the attorney general’s announcement, the family first saw the leaked videos on social media. By the time Kohen Wiley’s parents and grandparents met with state officials to view the videos on Thursday morning, most of the footage had been circulated online. At a press conference on Thursday afternoon, Kohen’s maternal grandmother, Veronica Roberson, called it “a slap in the face.”

Roberson said she’d been haunted by the word “justified” all week, slamming the idea that Foster fired the lethal shots because he feared for his life.

“You shot my grandbaby from the side of the car,” she said. “How are you in danger?”

“Get the Car!”

The incident began with what appeared to be a routine occurrence in retail outlets all over the country: a shoplifting allegation.

The earliest footage is from a Walmart security camera. An apparent Walmart employee dressed in a black hoodie is stationed by the store entrance when Wiley and Ferrell approach, carrying a child and a box of diapers. They pause at the door and appear to have a brief exchange with the Walmart employee before breaking into a run toward the parking lot.

In body camera footage, which begins moments later, the staffer in the hoodie appears in the doorway of a small security room, where other Walmart employees, three Senatobia police officers, and two Tate County sheriff’s deputies are gathered around a pair of computer monitors. According to the MBI report, the officers had been called to the store in response to a complaint that a man was sexually harassing customers.

The employee in the hoodie tells the cops and Walmart staffers that two people are running and gestures toward the store entrance.

Moments later, the five officers dash from the room and out into the parking lot, running toward a gray sedan. A sheriff’s deputy reaches the driver’s side door and puts his hand on the hood of the car while someone yells “stop.” The car backs up and starts to turn, but hits a parked SUV. Someone yells, “Stop the car!”

As the officers continue to run toward the car, it begins to move forward. At one point, two officers are directly in front of the vehicle, including Foster, the police sergeant identified as the shooter, who aims his gun at the front windshield.

The car starts to turn left, away from the three officers on the vehicle’s right side, and either narrowly misses or grazes Foster, who stumbles to the passenger side and aims his gun at the window. He then appears to fire three shots in rapid succession.

As the car pulls away, the officers continue their pursuit.

“Get the car! Get the car! Get the car!” one of them yells.

The gray sedan pauses briefly before taking off again.

The records released by state officials do not include any footage of what happened after the officers return to their vehicles. But the leaked footage, which was compiled into a nearly 7-minute long video, shows Foster pacing next to a police vehicle outside the nearby Highland Hills Medical Center an hour and 20 minutes after the shooting.

“I didn’t even see a fucking baby in her lap,” Foster says.

His colleague responds that nobody else did either: “All I saw was two females in the car.”

Reckless and Aggressive

As the leaked video began to circulate on social media on Tuesday, much of the attention focused on the moment the car moved toward Foster.

The Senatobia Police Department claimed from the start that the car drove toward officers and nearly hit one, suggesting the shots were fired in self-defense. Darkhorse Press, the independent Mississippi outlet that first published the leaked footage, even stated in a headline that the car “actually hit at least two officers.”

Among those who have repeated a version of this story is Republican Gov. Tate Reeves, who said the driver tried to “run over the policeman,” despite admitting that he had not actually watched the footage.

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What the videos show is that the police officers themselves needlessly escalated a shoplifting incident into the scenario that they claim put them at risk. Almost immediately after being informed that two people were “running,” the five armed officers sprinted out to the parking lot, surrounded the car, and, at various points in the confrontation, drew their guns. They also positioned themselves in a way that cut off any escape route for the driver.

These are reckless, aggressive tactics in response to a minor shoplifting charge. They also violate best practices in policing.

Most departments today prohibit officers from standing in front of the possible escape route of a car when someone inside is suspected of only minor offenses. Many also require officers to get out of the way of a vehicle if it drives toward them. While most departments authorize a police officer to use deadly force if they “reasonably” believe it’s necessary to protect their or others’ lives, this generally does not excuse using lethal force if the “reasonable” fear arose from a cop’s own violation of department policy.

Policies and best practices, however, don’t establish the bounds of legal liability; they are related but separate. Under the landmark Supreme Court case Tennessee v. Garner, a police officer can use deadly force if he “has a good-faith belief that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.” The law is less clear about criminal liability when an officer’s own illegal or ill-advised actions caused the circumstances that led him to fear for his safety.

Other examples of self-defense law hold people criminally liable if their own actions put them in harm’s way. In general, those cases indicate that a person can’t argue self-defense after killing someone if they instigated the altercation that led to the killing — even if it was reasonable to deploy lethal force when they did.

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By that standard, if an officer puts themselves in the path of a moving vehicle, they shouldn’t be able to justify lethal force by claiming to fear for their life because the vehicle was about to hit them. The law, however, isn’t crystal clear on this, and there’s at least some indication that the current Supreme Court may adopt a more lenient standard for police officers.

Moving Vehicle

Most police departments prohibit officers from shooting into moving vehicles unless someone inside poses a direct threat to the safety of others unrelated to use of the vehicle itself — for instance, if the person is armed and shooting at people. The reason is simple: Killing the driver of a moving car does not stop the car and can therefore exacerbate threats to public safety.

Like many other departments, the Senatobia police department’s policy contains vague language warning officers that firing into moving vehicles is dangerous to bystanders and unlikely to stop a car; it reads more like guidance than prohibition. One portion of the policy, however, is much clearer: Officers “will not” discharge firearms into a fleeing vehicle — with “will not” underlined for emphasis.

It seems clear from the leaked footage that Ferrell, the driver, maneuvered the car in what appeared to be an attempt to flee rather than to kill or injure officers. The video shows her at first trying to reverse away from police. After striking the SUV, however, she then appears to try to drive around and then between the officers. She then strikes another car while trying to drive away.

Foster’s actions aren’t consistent with any reasonable concept of self-defense. Footage shows that he fired at least three shots into the passenger side of the car. This was already apparent in the leaked body camera footage. It’s even clearer in the newly released video from Foster’s camera. By the time he fires the first of the three shots, he is clearly beside — not in front of — the car. By the time he fires the last shot, the car has passed him.

Even if Foster wanted to claim that he fired to disable the driver — and, again, his own department firmly prohibits shooting at a fleeing car — he fired through the passenger side window. He did so despite being told that there were two people inside, which means that whatever the driver was doing, he was also putting the other person at risk. 

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Trust What You Can See With Your Own Eyes

Ultimately, the videos depict a driver showing far more awareness for the officers’ safety from behind the wheel than Foster showed for the occupants of the car — or the surrounding bystanders.

Police policies should reflect how people behave in the real world, and people accused of stealing tend to flee. For armed officers to quickly escalate a shoplifting allegation puts everyone nearby at risk. Amid the frenzied response from the cops, Ferrell struck two other cars while attempting to escape. Anyone in or near those cars could have been injured or killed. Foster also fired his gun in a crowded parking lot. That, too, could have resulted in additional death or injury.

The police had other options. They could easily have written down the car’s license plate or obtained the plate number from the numerous surveillance tools at their disposal: their body camera footage, Walmart security footage, or one of the many Flock cameras nearby.

If they had to arrest the women, they could have done so later, at home and under less duress. They may not have caught Wiley or Ferrell red-handed with the alleged stolen goods, theoretically making a shoplifting prosecution more difficult. Creating an obstacle to prosecuting a shoplifting case, however, should be an easy tradeoff for not putting lives at risk.

Walmart’s Role

Finally, the leaked video footage raises important questions about Walmart’s role in Kohen Wiley’s death. The company has yet to publicly comment about the incident — and has not responded to repeated inquiries from The Intercept.

When the Walmart employee in the hoodie entered the room where officers were viewing security monitors, he told them that two people were fleeing the store. He did not say that one of them had a baby in her arms, even though surveillance footage showed Wiley carrying Kohen as she passed him. This would prove consequential, as Foster said in video footage that he had no idea there was a baby in the car.

Does Walmart policy require staff to tell police when a suspected shoplifter is accompanied by children? And how often does Walmart call on police for such minor crimes?

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This isn’t the first time aggressive policing of shoplifting at a Walmart has resulted in the death of an unarmed person. Earlier this year, deputies shot suspected shoplifters in two separate incidents at Walmarts in Florida. When police tackled a fleeing shoplifter in Anchorage, Alaska, recently, he pulled a gun and shot two officers before they returned fire, killing him.

Over the last 10 years, police have also shot suspected shoplifters at Walmarts in Miami; Decatur and San Antonio, Texas; Tempe, Arizona; Colorado Springs, Colorado; Chester, South Carolina; and Lake Forest, California. Most of the suspects were armed, but gunfire erupted only after police confronted them for shoplifting.

Walmart seems to have wavered over the years between aggressive crackdowns on suspected shoplifters and more lenient policies that factor in whether the suspect has been accused before, the necessity of the items they’re accused of stealing, and the value of the stolen goods.

Like many national retailers, the company’s policy when it comes to its own employees is to avoid confrontations with suspected shoplifters. A previous lawsuit revealed that the company’s stated policy as of 2010 was “PUT PEOPLE FIRST” (all caps in original) and prioritized “the physical well-being of suspects, customers and Walmart associates.”

That policy means little if the store simply outsources enforcement to police who take a far more aggressive approach. Walmart itself has also been criticized by police groups, who claim that cost-saving reductions in staff have made the store a more attractive target for shoplifting, which then leads to more calls to police.

And in Senatobia, the last high-profile incident of police violence before Kohen Wiley was killed took place in 2025 — at the same Walmart parking lot.

Even the best policing policies are useless if they aren’t enforced. And officers are rarely prosecuted, period. Foster’s resignation is at least some form of accountability, but the insistence from state officials that police did nothing wrong means there will be little to stop similar killings from happening again.

This week, residents of Senatobia returned to the Walmart for a vigil in honor of Kohen Wiley, in the same place where a makeshift shrine once stood. A community gathering has also been scheduled next weekend to mark what would have been his second birthday.

At the press conference Thursday, family and activists vowed to keep fighting for justice. As with so much police violence, however, the most pressing question isn’t whether Foster himself is punished. It’s whether we’re willing to tolerate more deaths like that of Kohen Wiley — whether Senatobia, Walmart, and the state of Mississippi will do anything to make clear that a 1-year-old’s life is more important than a pack of diapers.

Source: The Intercept · 2026-10-23