Miss. officer responds to call, discovers shooting victim is her son
“I couldn’t even believe what I was seeing," officer Laquandia Cooley told reporters on Monday.
A Mississippi police officer experienced every parent’s worst nightmare over the weekend when she responded to a call about a shooting and found her own son dead at the scene.
Officer Laquandia Cooley told WLBT-TV that she went into a state of panic Sunday morning when she arrived at an address on Larkin Street in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, a small city 30 miles south of Jackson. She found her 20-year-old son Charles Stewart Jr. laying dead in the middle of the road with a gunshot wound to the head.
“As we get out, I look and I was like, ‘This is my son, this is my son,'” Cooley told the local news station. “So, I literally just go into a breakdown you know? Like, why? Who would do this to my son?”
Cooley said she couldn’t believe her eyes when she realized the body in the street was her son’s.
“I was seeing my own son laying there on the ground dead,” she said. “It was pretty much a panic. It was just, it was too much.”
The motive and events leading up to the shooting remained unclear on Tuesday.
Hazlehurst Police Chief Darian Murray told reporters the investigation into Stewart’s death will be conducted by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation since the 20-year-old is the son of a police officer.
The state bureau did not immediately respond Tuesday to a request for comment from theGrio. Murray told WJTV on Monday that no suspects have been identified yet.
Stewart’s father, Charles Stewart Sr., told WLBT he also couldn’t believe it when he was told later that his son had been killed.
“It’s traumatizing for the whole family,” he said. “We’re just trying to cope day to day. Just trying to figure out why this happened and who could have did this.”
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