A fatal police shooting in a tiny Mississippi city made international headlines this summer for its harrowing details: A confrontation over shoplifting ended with a 1-year-old boy struck dead in a Walmart parking lot.
The city, Senatobia, has been in turmoil since. The police chief was fired after it was revealed he had sent racist text messages. A man was charged with trying to set fire to police headquarters. And weeks of outcry have followed the announcement by Attorney General Lynn Fitch in October that she would not bring criminal charges against the officer who killed the toddler, Kohen Wiley.
The officer, Hunter Foster, resigned from the city’s police department after Ms. Fitch’s decision. He hasn’t spoken publicly, and in a state where police personnel and disciplinary records are considered secret, not much about his seven-year career in law enforcement has come to light.
But a new examination of incidents captured on video shows that Mr. Foster had a history of aggressive behavior, ramping up encounters that began over apparently minor infractions.
Reporters for The New York Times, Mississippi Today and Verite News reviewed video from 12 incidents from Mr. Foster’s earlier time at the DeSoto County Sheriff’s Office, the only agency among his former employers that provided detailed records in response to a public records request. We also reviewed footage included in two federal lawsuits he was named in, and from a May incident in Senatobia.
The encounters represent a small sample of Mr. Foster’s interactions with the public. But three policing experts who separately examined the videos at our request said they raised questions about his temperament, professionalism and the proportionality of his responses.
In the Walmart case, two women had been accused of shoplifting baby clothes and a box of Pampers Easy Ups. Mr. Foster and other officers surrounded their car as they tried to flee. Mr. Foster stood in front of the car and then opened fire as it drove toward him, video shows. One of the bullets struck Kohen, who was sitting in his mother’s lap in the passenger seat. Mr. Foster was the only one to fire.
Several of Mr. Foster’s past encounters similarly began over minor incidents and then escalated into violence, with the officer tackling, punching or drawing his Taser or firearm in response to minor provocations.
He displayed “an orientation toward going to force almost without warning,” said Michael Gennaco, a former federal civil rights prosecutor who now operates a police oversight consultancy in California.
In one case, Mr. Foster tackled a man after he didn’t immediately put his hands behind his back, then punched him at least 14 times while he was pinned to the ground.
In another, he continued to yank on the arm of a man who was screaming in pain. Mr. Foster was attempting to detain him after a discrepancy with his vehicle tags.
In a third, while detaining an Uber passenger suspected of possessing marijuana, he shoved the man’s face down toward the hood of a squad car. In an ensuing struggle, Mr. Foster punched the man at least six times, including before giving him any clear commands.
After reporters shared a detailed summary of this article’s findings, Mr. Foster’s lawyer, Martin Zummach, replied that some of the characterizations of his client’s behavior was slanderous, though he didn’t respond to specific questions. He has described the Walmart shooting as “unfortunate,” but maintained that Mr. Foster did not know there was a child in the car and that he had acted in defense of himself and other officers.
In most of the cases, Mr. Foster filed reports to explain his use of physical force. Those descriptions did not always line up with the footage. He was one of several officers named in a 2021 lawsuit accusing them of falsifying incident reports to say that a driver, whom officers later beat, had almost run one of them over. But video shows the car did not drive toward or nearly hit anyone.
In court papers, Mr. Foster, who did not participate in the beating, denied having knowledge that any part of his report was inaccurate. The lawsuit was settled in 2022.
‘Traumatic, traumatic experience’
From 2021 to 2024, Mr. Foster worked at the DeSoto County Sheriff’s Office, where he built a reputation as a prolific patrol officer. Two years in a row, he won an award for issuing the most D.U.I. citations of any officer in the state.
Laterrius Inge encountered Mr. Foster one afternoon in March 2022, while having car trouble. He said the used Camaro he had recently purchased had started jerking. Mr. Foster arrived just before Mr. Inge popped open the hood.
Body-worn camera footage shows them chatting calmly at first, but things change after a dispatcher informs Mr. Foster that the license plate on the car doesn’t match the Camaro, and that Mr. Inge can’t be identified by the name he had given.
Without warning, Mr. Foster reaches out to cuff his left hand.
“What are you doing?” Mr. Inge asks, raising his right hand in surrender. Mr. Foster, still holding Mr. Inge by his handcuff, points his Taser, threatening to shock Mr. Inge if he doesn’t turn around.
Mr. Foster then grabs Mr. Inge by his arm and shoves him against the car. Mr. Inge crumples to the ground, screaming, “My wrist!” At one point, Mr. Foster drags Mr. Inge by his handcuffs across the pavement.
Mr. Foster wrote in his report that he had dragged Mr. Inge to get him on his stomach, but that he kept rolling on his back, refusing to give up his arm.
Matt Steffey, a law professor at Mississippi Christian University who helped draft the state’s rules on criminal procedure, said the video could be “a training video on how not to conduct a traffic stop.”
Mr. Inge faced a number of charges, including for a switched tag. He told reporters that Mr. Foster had caused a shoulder injury.
“It was a traumatic, traumatic experience,” he said.
‘Why are you beating me up?’
Experts who reviewed the footage said that Mr. Foster appeared to have escalated some situations without warning.
One night in 2023, he stopped a man, Jonathan Fields, over an improper vehicle tag. Dashboard camera footage shows the incident escalated after the man informed Mr. Foster, when asked, that he had a gun in the car. (Mississippi is an open carry state.)
Mr. Foster, who later wrote in his report that Mr. Fields had grabbed the weapon, ordered him out of the car at gunpoint. The action isn’t clear from the footage, but Mr. Fields can be heard saying, “I was just trying to show you where it’s at.”
Mr. Foster tells Mr. Fields not to move while he questions him about having marijuana in the car. When Mr. Fields takes a few steps toward his car, a second deputy tells him to stop. When he does, the officer tries to handcuff him, Mr. Fields waves his hands away, and Mr. Foster tackles him.
Mr. Foster punches Mr. Fields at least 14 times while the other officer holds him down. “Why are you beating me up?” Mr. Fields yells.
In his use-of-force report, Mr. Foster called his punches “distractive,” delivered when he felt Mr. Fields tense his body, which he interpreted as part of an effort to fight back.
‘Can you please stop cussing?’
By the time Mr. Foster started working in Senatobia in March 2025, the city of roughly 8,400 people — 40 percent of whom are Black — was reeling from a string of policing controversies.
In 2023, the city’s chief of police, who is white, was caught on camera barging into a Black man’s home and choking him, believing a fugitive was hiding inside. The following year, two Black teenage girls accused the chief of shouting, “Get your Black ass out of the road” when he arrested them. After a Black woman was thrown to the ground by an officer in the same Walmart parking lot where Kohen was later killed, city leaders voted to remove the chief.
So in June, many residents saw the fatal shooting of Kohen as part of a pattern of racist policing.
Things intensified in August when we reported on internal complaints alleging that Mr. Foster, who is white, had used racist language toward his colleagues. In September, we revealed the police chief at the time had routinely used racist slurs in texts to a colleague. That chief was pushed out too.
Experts agreed that an incident in May, captured on Mr. Foster’s body-worn camera, was the most problematic one they reviewed.
Within a minute of arriving at a home in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Senatobia, where a woman had accused her child’s father of hitting her, Mr. Foster launches into an expletive-filled tirade.
Upon learning the man accused had left, Mr. Foster raises his voice at her and two other women standing outside, calling them a “bunch of motherfuckers.”
“Can you please stop cussing?” said one of the women, Kenesha Herron. “No, ‘cause I’m sick of this shit,” he says. He accuses them of trying to hide the man. “I’m tired of y’all doing this,” Mr. Foster says.
“Tired of who doing what?” Ms. Herron asks, having interpreted his comment as being racially motivated. She later said in an interview that she had “never felt so openly hated” because of her skin color.
“He’s the kind of officer that is to blame for the fact that communities of color have no confidence in public safety,” said Mr. Gennaco, the former civil rights prosecutor.
After the altercation, Mr. Foster apologizes to Ms. Herron, footage shows. “I’m sorry for being loud with you,” he says. “Sometimes things get heated.”
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