A troubled police department at the center of two controversies caught fire on Saturday in Mississippi in what investigators suspect was arson.
Firefighters were dispatched to the Senatobia Police Department at 4:58 a.m. after a report of smoke in the building, the Senatobia Fire Department said in a statement.
Crews were able to quickly knock out the fire and the extent of the damage to the building was not immediately clear.
The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and local agencies are now working to find out who set fire to the building in Senatobia, about 40 miles (65 kilometers) south of Memphis.
The police department has faced mounting criticism in the past few months. Initial anger stemmed from an officer shooting and killing 1-year-old Kohen Wiley in June while investigating a shoplifting call at a Walmart.
Wiley, who is Black, was in the vehicle with his mother, who was unharmed, and her friend, who was seriously injured. The two women denied having stolen anything, and no charges have been filed against them.
The officer involved in the shooting, Sgt. Hunter Foster, resigned earlier this month after being cleared of criminal wrongdoing by the Mississippi Attorney General’s office, which concluded that his use of force had been justified.
The department faced further outrage in September, when The New York Times, Mississippi Today and Verite News uncovered that the police chief repeatedly used racist slurs in private text messages.
The Board of Aldermen voted unanimously to fire Police Chief Harold “Hal” Vanderford, rejecting a resignation letter he had submitted earlier in the day.
Vanderford, 60, had assumed the chief role last October. He was accused of sending texts containing a racist slur more than a dozen times across 10 separate conversations. In one message, he said he had a “racist moment” and in another he said he “almost beat” a Black man, using a slur.
He wrote that he had been loudly repeating the slur at home in hopes his neighbors heard him. Multiple acquaintances confirmed the phone number associated with the text messages belonged to Vanderford.
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