Federal agents investigate arson at Mississippi police department

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is investigating a fire set at the Senatobia, Mississippi police department early Saturday. Firefighters were dispatched at 4:58 a.m. to smoke in the building and knocked the fire down quickly; no details about the damage have been released.

The building that burned has spent the year at the center of the town's politics. In June, a Senatobia officer answering a shoplifting call at a Walmart shot and killed one-year-old Kohen Wiley, who was in a vehicle with his mother and a friend. The friend was seriously injured; the mother was unharmed. Both women denied stealing anything, and no charges were filed against them. In September, the police chief was fired after reporting by the New York Times, Mississippi Today and Verite News alleged he used racist slurs in private text messages. Earlier this month, the officer who fired resigned. The Mississippi attorney general's office reviewed the shooting and concluded that the officer's use of force was justified.

The department's year, in summary: a child killed during a shoplifting call, a chief dismissed over private messages, an officer who resigned, and a state finding that the force used against a one-year-old was justified. No charges were ever filed in the Walmart encounter — not against the women in the vehicle, and not against the officer, whom the attorney general cleared.

Federal arson investigators at a police station mean the working assumption is that someone targeted the department. The year's record supplies no shortage of grievances against it; what it does not supply is a suspect, a motive, or a damage estimate. Senatobia sits about forty miles south of Memphis, a town whose police department has been in the headlines twice in five months — once for a dead child, once for a burned station.

Firefighters had the flames out within minutes of the 4:58 a.m. call. The state's file on Kohen Wiley's death was already closed.