The Senatobia police chief who took over a Mississippi department already under fire for how it treated Black residents was fired last Tuesday after reporters found he had been using the N word and other slurs in text messages the entire time he held the job. Harold Vanderford submitted a resignation letter that same day. The Board of Aldermen, which is what Senatobia calls its city council, refused to accept it and voted unanimously to fire him instead.
Mississippi Today, the New York Times, and Verite News published the reporting in August. Their investigation found Vanderford used racial slurs more than a dozen times in private texts to a colleague. In one message he wrote that he had almost beaten a [expletive] and a white woman. The messages run from the summer of 2025 through his time in office, meaning he was sending them before he was ever sworn in and kept sending them after.
To understand why a Senatobia police chief was hired in the first place, you have to look at who he replaced. Richard Chandler ran the department through a stretch of incidents that turned Black residents against it. In 2023 his officers arrested a 10 year old Black boy for urinating in public. An officer threatened a woman with a Taser and pulled her out of her car during an argument over a handicapped parking space, in the lot of the same Walmart that would later become a crime scene. A Black woman was sexually assaulted by an officer who is no longer with the department. In July 2025 the Board of Aldermen declined to reappoint Chandler. Vanderford was appointed at the end of September and took over in October.
Eight months later, on June 14, 2026, officers responded to a shoplifting call at that Walmart. An officer fired into a vehicle. One year old Kohen Wiley was killed. A woman in the car was wounded. Kohen’s mother, Vellesiya Wiley, was driving. She says they were pulling away when the shooting started. Police say the car was moving toward officers. No charges have been filed against Vellesiya Wiley or the friend who was with her, and she denies anyone in that car stole anything. Ben Crump, the civil rights attorney representing the family, said police were called over a box of diapers and a family had to bury their baby.
Senatobia is a city of roughly 8,500 people about 40 miles south of Memphis. Kohen was Black. His mother is Black. The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, the state agency that takes over cases local departments cannot investigate themselves, took the case and has not released the Walmart surveillance video or any body camera footage. Nearly three months later the family has not seen what happened. The officer who fired remains on administrative leave, meaning he is off duty but still employed and typically still paid while the investigation runs.
That is the backdrop the texts landed in. And the city’s first response was to stand behind the Senatobia police chief. Mayor Greg Graves and the Board of Aldermen met with Vanderford on August 25 about what the city’s own statement described as a recently published story concerning private text messages that allegedly came from his phone. The statement the city released the next day said Vanderford appeared voluntarily, answered every question asked of him, gave sincere responses, and would continue to serve the city with confidence.
Seven days later the same body voted him out. The city clerk confirmed the vote was unanimous and that the board rejected his resignation. No one on the board explained what changed. The police department declined to comment. Vanderford could not be reached.
Crump connected the two stories directly. He said the racist language that cost the chief his job is exactly why this family cannot be told to simply trust the process, and called on the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation to release the footage and give the family the facts they have been owed since the day Kohen died.
Alderman Chris McConnell has called for an independent investigation of the entire department. Lieutenant Angelica Maze is running it while the city searches for a new chief. That makes two chiefs Senatobia has lost in fourteen months, both over how the department treats Black people.
Nothing about the firing changes the status of the shooting investigation. The footage is still sealed. The officer is still on leave. Kohen Wiley is still dead. What the firing did was confirm something the family had already been asked to set aside: the man running the department while they waited for answers had been calling people like them slurs in writing the whole time.
