Senatobia Homicide

Homicide is a simple and objective term that is a combination of two things - homo & cide. Homicide is not a crime. Let me say it louder. Homicide is not a crime!!  

Murder is a crime. Manslaughter is a crime. These crimes have varying degrees depending on the details of what happened, including how it was done and the level of criminal intent. 

If someone comes to your house today and puts a gun to your face with their finger on the trigger and says I’m going to kill you in five seconds and you pull your own gun and shoot them that is a homicide. Completely justified and legal. Still homicide.

Anyone being killed is a damn tragedy, but especially a small child.

Tune in this morning for a bonus episode on the officer involved shooting in small-town Mississippi.

-LEO

Transcript

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Good morning. It's Leo and happy Juneteenth. I want to get into a little bit of what's going on in Cenatopia, Mississippi, and you know, do a little bit of analysis of what went on. I did a post about it on the socials, but I know a lot of my listeners are around my age, which means you don't know how to work a computer machine or the Facebook. So first of all, Cohen Wiley was shot and killed in Sanitopia earlier this week. He was one. Absolute tragedy. Nobody can argue with that. That a one-year-old just does not deserve to be killed. There are, I wouldn't call it riots. I'm not there. I'm getting this information from the news and what I'm seeing online, people posting videos of what's going on there. I have not gone to Cenatopia, even though it's not far from me. I have no business in Senatobia or at that Walmart. But people are very upset, understandably. So let's get into it a little bit. What happened is, if you're not aware, police were dispatched to a call of shoplifting at the Senatobia Walmart. When they got there, there were two adults who had a small baby with them who attempted to flee in a car. When they attempted to flee, the officer fired, claiming that the car drove at him and put his life in danger, that he was defending himself by firing. When he fired into the car, the one-year-old Cohen Wiley was struck as well as the other adult, not Cohen Wiley's mother, but the other adult that was in the vehicle. The vehicle then fled and got away and turned up at the hospital. The baby was deceased, and the other adult had been struck and was critically injured. I don't know. I believe it was another woman, and I don't know her status right now. So let's get into some of the considerations. First of all, people are saying, you know, witnesses, people in Sanitobi are saying, uh, you know, the baby was killed because they were stealing diapers. Baby was killed for, you know, the adults stealing pampers. Please don't spin things into this angle. Don't make this tragedy into something it's not, which is cops executing somebody for stealing basic human needs, such as diapers, because that's not what happened at all. What happened is the officer is claiming, and I haven't seen, because I don't think they've been released, the body cam or the Walmart surveillance video or the witness statements, but the officer is claiming that the car drove at him and he fired in order to stop the threat. So should that be true, the statement that she was killed for stealing pampers, it's just so far from the truth. The implication of that statement is that she was walking out with a box of pampers and a cop came up and shot a baby. So don't pollute this tragedy with lies, is what I'm saying. It's bad enough without that. And lots of other things, lots of other statements. The mother released a statement saying that she held the baby up in the car, basically implying that the officer must have known that there was a small child in the car. I have personally been, I didn't fire, but I was at a scene where I'll just give you the rundown. I was on the Marshall Fugitive Task Force, and we were trying to catch a guy who had a warrant for murder, and we had a failed vehicle pin. And when we did, my partner got out of his vehicle, and the driver drove right at him extremely fast. This happened in well under a second. And he was parked where where he attempted the pin, he was in front of the suspect's vehicle and had backed in in front of it to try to block it. And she was able to mash the gas, turn the wheel hard left, and I would say probably 0.2 to 0.1 of a second, she had accelerated. She was not in a sports car, she was in this little small sedan, like an Altima or a Centra or something. Those things still take off. And she went right through his door where he was standing. He was standing just outside his driver's side door, and he dove out of the way and fired two shots. I was the rear pin vehicle, he was the front pin. There was a little bit of space left, and she was able to go through it and went through right where he was standing. And had he not dove out of the way, he would have been critically injured or possibly killed. I have no doubt. I was right behind her car. He fired two shots. One went through the windshield, one went through the driver window and hit her in the neck. And her her via, I'm talking about his driver door was pinned. Picture it like this, because she hit the driver door from behind. It was pinned forward, like it folded completely forward against the front quarter panel of the vehicle up where the hood is. So she drove and scraped down the side of his car. He would have been under or above that car, completely smooshed or through the windshield. So you have 0.1 of a second to dive and make a decision. Luckily, I mean, I'd probably be at my friend's funeral if he had not done that. I would say she abs what I saw, she absolutely tried to kill him. Or just wasn't thinking, and the standard response that we've all heard a million times if we're in law enforcement, well, I was scared. And being scared does not justify running over a cop, shooting a cop, running from the cops when you see blue lights. Well, I was scared. I've been seeing things on social media and I was scared. We've all heard that. You know, you try to talk to somebody, you pull over a car, and they bail out and run. You say, Why'd you why'd you run? They go, I was scared. It's like that's not a reason to flee and put people in danger. So I say all that to say they are they're claiming that these these folks drove right at the officer. And she claims that she was holding up the baby. He must have seen the baby. And that's just not really how it happens when you have under a second to react to someone running you over with their car instead of stopping. So it's something to think about. Also, the obvious consideration of how could you even hold up a baby? I'm not trying to shame them. That's that's not the goal of this. I'm trying to objectively just look at it of why wasn't the baby in a car seat if you weren't stealing stuff, one-year-old should be in a booster seat, which is strapped in in the back, which let's do a side note on that, because I've got a bunch of kids, and uh, booster seats can be hard sometimes. Moms, that if you're not mechanically proficient to put in a booster seat and tighten down the little straps and hook it on the hooks under the seat and do it right, go to your local fire station. I hope my firefighter listeners get an influx of work because all these people are showing up because they will hook it in correctly. I've done it personally when I was a pretty new dad, and man, I was out on a trip somewhere and I had it hooked in wrong. I thought it was in right, and the car seat like tipped a little bit. Like it didn't like dump my kid out, but like I saw it in the back seat flop to kind of an angle, and I was like, oh god. And I went to a fire and they like fixed it and showed me how to do it super fast. So they will. So if you don't know how to put in a car seat, and man, you can probably get like a damn near free one at Goodwill or Once Upon a Child or one of these. So yeah, just get a car seat and put the child in the car seat because anyone that's been a cop for a while, you may not have seen the dead child, but you've seen brutal car accidents where you're like, oh, that person should have been strapped in. And Mama Bears, if you're driving down, man, I see it on 240 and 40 in Memphis all the time. People driving next to me. I saw a lady this week driving with, she was driving on I-240, which is like a racetrack, with a small child, like probably two, maybe younger, in her lap, and she was texting, going like 80. And I was like, oh, I was on the phone with somebody and I was like, oh my God, you should see this lady next to me. She's definitely gonna like sling this baby out of the car. You see it almost every day. So just strap the babies in. All right, I'm gonna stop chasing the squirrel for a minute and get back into Cenetopia. Baby should be in a booster seat. If your driver is driving straight at the police, please don't hold the baby up in front of you. I have concerns about that. I'm guessing it was just like a defensive reaction. Like your child was in your lap and you tried to hold him up real quick. You saw a cop drawing his gun, you tried to hold him up. But just think about the actuality of what you're doing, which is there's someone drawing a gun who's clearly afraid and in front of a moving car, and you got a baby in your hands in front of you. Yeah, hopefully just roll over on the baby. All right, I'm sounding real judgy, feeling a little judgy. I have a lot of concerns about the mother's decisions here. I'll just go ahead and say it. Whether she was stealing or not, I don't know. But I personally don't associate with people that are gonna flee from the police in cars. So ending up accused of shoplifting and then in a car that's fleeing and driving straight at the police, and after shots are fired and people are hit, not stopping to get help immediately. I mean, every one of those decisions is something I just don't see myself ever ending up in. I'm not I don't get accused of stealing normally. I've I worked undercover for years. I looked like shit. Clerks would follow me in stores. I had a big beard, we would burn fake weed, so I reeked of weed. I had long hair, I wouldn't shower, I'd have beer on my clothes, so I stunk of alcohol and marijuana. They would be watching me, and I didn't steal. And I never got jacked up by the cops. And I don't think that's anything beyond there was nothing worth stopping me for. I was under surveillance by the by security at places I went. But they never jacked me up because I didn't like to put stuff in my shirt or carry it out of the store. So, yeah, I never get jacked up for attempted shoplifting. I'm never in cards that flee. Just I it's crazy. So beyond that, they have not released the body cam surveillance video. I'm guessing the body cam or dash cam will be first. I am a little surprised that it hasn't come out. The trend across the country has been to release it as soon as possible. I don't know if that means they just want to do a thorough investigation or if it means that it was a bad shoot. I don't know. I'm not gonna pretend to know. But I do hope that they release it pretty quickly for the sake of the Walmart, of the other officers in the area that are having to deal with this situation, that were totally uninvolved, and simply for the sake of transparency and telling the people of Senatobia and showing them. Whether that means showing them and saying, here's an officer that was about to be killed by a moving car and show how fast it happens, or here's an officer that did the wrong thing and was out of policy and shouldn't have fired, and either put himself in front of the car, which is against our policy, or you know, the car wasn't quite coming at him, whatever. We all know how I mean, we saw the stuff up in in Minnesota when all the ice stuff was going on with with those shootings. It's fast, but there's a lot of judgment on where exactly the officer was and how fast the car was going and what the driver should have seen, what the officer saw, and what options they had. There's all these considerations. So I'm hoping that they release that soon just to kind of quell the public, because I don't think the public is going to calm down anytime soon. I wouldn't be surprised, especially with Ben Crump now involved representing the the victim and his family. I wouldn't be surprised if out-of-town agitators come in, which in a town like Senatobia, where there's probably like, I don't know, 50 cops or way less than that, they're not really equipped. They'll have to get, you know, highway patrol in to help them if one of these busloads of agitators comes in. So I hope that doesn't happen. And releasing the body cam and being real about it is ideal. Charging decisions, I've touched on this before. Should people get charged, be that the driver, hopefully not the officer. Not hopefully not because there's a cover-up, hopefully not because hopefully he did the right thing. I never hope for a bad, unjustified shooting. But hopefully those charging decisions are made based in law. If someone with the DA's office down there is listening, or or the federal prosecutor's office for the it's probably like the Northern District of Mississippi, hopefully there's not an emotional charging decision where, you know, somebody is charged with something that doesn't really fit the statute because we're playing to the public's, you know, the court of public opinion and social media and all this crap, which is not where our charging decisions belong, not how our investigation should be run. So I hope the DA or the U.S. attorney down there can honestly just speak up and say, here's what we have, because their job is to charge based on the facts, not based on, you know, people are screaming outside Walmart because they're pissed, righteously pissed, child is dead, but that doesn't mean that somebody committed a crime. There are lots of variations where that's not what happened. So I'd say I hope they release it soon, uh, so that things don't just keep festering like a boil on your foot and you keep wearing the same old boots. We gotta look at it through the lens of objective objective reasonableness and the totality of the circumstances. I'm not gonna go all the way back into it. I already did several episodes with Rob Santoro with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, who has investigated he's done force review for like years at both the city and the state level as a as a city homicide detective, city homicide supervisor, and state investigator in Minnesota, where it's a hotbed. So he has done investigations into plenty of officer-involved shootings, both fatal and not, where home agencies conflicted out where they didn't want to investigate their own, just like they're doing in this case, where Mississippi Bureau of Investigation is doing it, not Senatobia Police, because you don't want an appearance of impropriety or you know, bias or anything like that. So you let an outside agency do it. And I've already covered, you know, the statutes, the case law, and the rules that govern this. And it basically comes down to there is a total analysis of was the officer objectively reasonable? Was the person an imminent threat to life? And what the prongs are that go into it? Was there act of aggression? What was the flight? What was the crime being investigated? And were they an imminent threat? So that's how this is going to be looked at. It's not looked at by are people pissed because a child is dead at the hands of a police officer. That is not the standard. So just keep that in mind. You have the full right to be pissed, but now it's time to determine who should you be pissed at? Who is at fault for this death? Is it the driver or is it the officer? Somebody's probably going to be found responsible for this. And if the driver was driving at a high speed right at the officer, it's probably the driver. That's kind of what it boils down to. And if it's found that the driver was not, it's probably the officer. It's kind of the brass tacks of it, I believe. And they'll go through all the information available to figure that out. And then obviously another statute, or not statute, another case law that applies would be Tennessee versus Garner. You can't shoot at a fleeing felon. So if the driver drove right at him and then was past him and driving away and no longer a threat, Tennessee vs. Garner is a case law where a guy, I think he'd done a burglary, he jumped a fence and the officer shot him in the back as he ran away. He was not an ongoing threat. He had committed a felony, and it was found that you cannot shoot people as they're fleeing a felony if they don't present an active ongoing threat. So that would be another one that another case law that might apply in this situation. Man, I I think most of us do have an issue with when there's a critical incident, riots and burning things. I have an understanding that it feels like it's not getting attention or not getting handled fast enough or not getting handled right, and people are pissed, and it's like the only way to get attention, the only way for my voice to be heard is to do this stuff. That's I'm pretty sure that's how people look at it. Like, I gotta do this because y'all aren't doing your job, and you need to handle this. But it's more of a mindset of like, you need to handle this officer and this system that caused this, when in reality, if you rush it, I mean a rushed investigation would look like this. Watch the body cam. If it looks like she drove it, the cop, arrest her with aggravated assault on police, and probably some level of murder for causing the death of the child during the incident. That would that's probably how a rushed investigation would come out. If you have to ch make a charging decision, someone she was committing a felony and someone died, so she would probably get like shoplifting if they were found to be f stealing, fleeing and eluding by vehicle, aggravated assault on police, and like felony murder, or you know, causing the death of another. So what people need to do is slow down a little bit, let them do their job, by all means demand answers. But if you demand it at the uh in the way of making your Walmart close, like what does that have to do with the situation? Walmart can't work. I mean, yeah, Sam Walton's gonna be fine. Walmart's gonna be okay. And if you want to stand on the sidewalk, but just remember, like, the Walmart workers, the Walmart manager, those people are out of work because the store's been shut down. Like those are your friends and neighbors, and they ain't working. And remember the all the other Senatobe officers, I guarantee you, I've been there when I was a cop. When a high profile incident happens, people relate you to it. We had a guy who was shot and killed while he was in handcuffs. He was his nickname was Mr. D. And it was on Augusta Avenue. And he got his cuffs. He was in the back of the police car. He had on all these layers of clothes. It was wintertime. He had on like pants and then sweatpants and then basketball shorts. And he had a gun, a small gun, tucked somewhere in there between the layers. The cop missed it on the search. I think he picked him up on a rush warrant and put him in the back of the car, cuffed him behind his back. He's one of these tall, skinny dudes, and he got his cuffs under his legs around to the front and pulled the gun. So the cop looks back. Cop was a veteran, looks back, sees him like fiddling with his hands in the front, gets out, sees him pulling a gun and shoots and kills him. And people didn't like that. People were super pissed. What do you think the headlines read? It didn't say Mr. D tries to kill cop to escape. It said Savannah police kill handcuffed man that's in custody. So that's a huge spin on the reality of it. That makes it look like, again, like it was some kind of cold-blooded murder. And I would go to calls and people would be like, I can't let you put me in custody because you're gonna kill me like y'all did Mr. D, like you did Mr. D. I'd be like, dude, I didn't fucking kill anybody. What are you talking about? I wasn't even over there. Like, you lumping me in with a group? You want me to lump you in with a group of people? You want me to just identify you with a group and say if they did something, you did something? Is that fair? No. So don't lump me in with anybody else. And second of all, you don't even know the facts. So quit saying that, you know, the cop did something wrong. What are you gonna do if somebody in cuffs is pulling a gun out? Somebody with a warrant for armed robbery, I think that's what it was, is pulling a gun out on you. Like, I hope you defend yourself. You don't have to die. Nobody says you have to die because of the position they're in. Like, oh, if they're in handcuffs, they're allowed to kill you. Give me a break. So I'm not sure how I got down that rabbit hole, but we're gonna keep rolling with it. Uh-oh, just don't lump in the Cenatobi officers with anything, even if it's a bad shoot, it's not their fault. And if it's a good shoot, maybe accept that and go, I don't want to say it's a good shoot, because that sounds wrong. If the officer was in fact defending himself, defending his life, so it's a justified self-defense shooting. It's not a good shoot in the thought of a child died. But if the officer was diving out of the way of a car and someone was holding up a baby as he like you're kind of set up for failure. Like you gotta either die or fire. And if you fire, they're holding up a baby. Like that officer's kind of effed right there, right? So just don't blame those officers. Don't take it out on them. If they're having to stand there in riot gear and say, get back, get back, get back, they probably don't want to be doing that this Friday morning or this Friday night. So, you know, don't spit on them, don't throw things on them. That's just shitty behavior. Those are people who signed up to protect the community. And if you do that, don't spit on me, I'll tell you right now. And I hope you don't want to get spit on. That's a that's a line pretty much everybody has is you're not gonna spit on me. I'm not gonna take that. I saw a recent video online of some just wasted drunk chick, I think it was probably in Florida, it's always Florida, and she just like hocks a loogie on this officer's face and he slapped her. She was already in handcuffs in the back of the car. He slapped her. And I was like, I remember watching it, and you can see the loogie on his face. And I remember thinking, like, man, I don't know how you control that reaction. Like, I'm not big on saying, like, oh, I just reacted, I'm out of control. But it's also that's kind of self-defensive. Like, if you spit on me, I don't care who you are. If you're 80 pounds or 300, you're probably getting a tune up immediately. If I lose that fight, I lose that fight. But I'm not getting spit on again. What if you got hepatitis or AIDS? I'm not gonna let you spit in my eye. That's crazy talk. And on top of that, it's just it's like the age old highest form of disrespect. So, guys, don't do these officers like that. They didn't do anything. Don't mock them, don't be jerks. And people that already don't like the police, don't use this as an opportunity to treat them like shit. Don't be criminals of opportunity. Don't tear up stores, don't tear up your own community where people live and work, and now they're having to pick up all the chips you threw everywhere. Just don't start that, please. Ideally, the bottom line is if you want a rushed investigation, you're gonna get a bad product. You're gonna get a poor investigation. And you can be pissed, but and you can be loudly pissed. Get megaphones. Be disruptive if you need to. But just know where a reasonable boundary is. If you're standing in the middle of the road blocking traffic, just don't escalate things into it becoming a worse situation for the community. And if you start looking at it like that, I just hope things go as smoothly as they can down there, and there's a swift response from the police department, the city, and the DA's office to, you know, explain what happened, give full transparency, give, even if it's not a final decision, some kind of preliminary decision. I've seen a lot of stuff saying, you know, there's a lot of news saying, uh, that the officer's on admin leave following this homicide. And it's like, yes, it was a homicide. A person killed a person. Yes, everyone goes on admin leave after a shooting. The only place I've seen it be very short is the Marshall Service, where they'll kind of put you right back to work, or they they were 15 years ago. But most police departments, you're gonna do some time on admin leave. Yes, it's gonna be paid admin leave while they figure out if you did something wrong or not, if you were in if you were within policy and law. So that's normal. You know, putting that out as a major news headline is just again, it's just kind of clickbait of like playing on the ignorance of the reader. Like, oh my god, he's on admin leave. Like, yeah, everybody goes on admin leave if you shoot somebody. That's that's how they always do it. They're going to take your duty weapon. They should give you a replacement weapon immediately before you even leave the scene. That's all normal stuff. So prayers for Cenatobia, prayers for the family of all involved. Uh I'll say prayers for the officer because I'm sure he's getting threats. I'm sure his family is dealing with stuff. I hope he stays safe. And, you know, regardless of if it was a justified self-defense shooting or not, I am completely confident, given the facts, given that he had no intention of shooting a child. And you just gotta really take that into consideration when you pick your level of anger, is why did this happen? It did happen. And I think a lot of people are focusing on the what happened. A child was shot, yes. And the really important next step is why. And let's just redial on that at this point. We can be completely sad and overwhelmed with sadness and grief, but we can't condemn innocent people. And that process takes time to find out who is innocent and who's to blame. Best wishes to Senatobia and to all the officers working there, and thank you for holding the line, and I hope you stay safe. Leo out.