What Happened?: Nolan Wells' family is still searching for answers two weeks after the 18-year-old's tragic death

What Happened?: Nolan Wells’ family is still searching for answers two weeks after the 18-year-old’s tragic death

Investigation continues after college freshman was found dead on Mississippi island after 4 July boat trip with friends

Two weeks after Nolan Xavier Wells was found dead, his family is still searching for answers.

On 4 July, Wells, an 18-year-old Mississippi college freshman, and a group of friends took a boat out to Horn Island, a barrier island a few miles off the Mississippi Gulf coast.

About 300 young adults gathered on a section of the island for a “last hurrah” before returning to college or work, one of Wells’s friends said. Wells’s parents were supposed to take him to Southwest Mississippi Community College for football camp the following Monday.

Wells’s friends, his phone and his keys returned that day; he did not. Instead, after a missing person search that received national attention, his body was found on the island on 6 July.

What exactly happened on Horn Island is still unclear, as is how the Ocean Springs native died; an investigation by local officials is ongoing. In the absence of answers, misinformation, particularly on social media, is rampant. Here’s what we know so far.

Family speaks out

Late on 4 July, a Facebook post by Christine Wonsley, Wells’s mother, in which she sought answers about her then missing son, went viral.

When she shared a photo of Wells, who was Black, and three friends, who are white, social media users began suggesting that whatever happened to Wells was racially motivated.

At a press conference on 10 July in New York, after Wells’s body was found, Wonsley addressed the racial nature of the situation.

“Me and his dad had conversations with him all the time, not just about the importance of understanding our history as Black people, but also the importance of how you have to move in certain spaces,” she said, standing by the Rev Al Sharpton and Ben Crump, who the family has retained as an attorney.

Crump said on Sunday at the New Birth Missionary Baptist church outside Atlanta: “We are in Mississippi. These were three young white men. Nolan was the only young Black man. Had the roles been reversed, we know this investigation would be going differently. It would be like the first 48. They would be interrogating those young, Black boys.”

Ashlee Cole, the mother of one of Wells’s white friends and a Jackson county chancery judge, denied that her family had hindered the investigation in a statement. She said that her son had been interviewed by the Jackson county sheriff’s office and alleged that Wells left the island with a separate group of friends.

Tracestin Shepherd, who said he was a friend of Wells and was on the island on 4 July, told ABC News that Wells met a young woman and wanted to stay behind. Crump has said that the young woman said Wells decided to return with his friends. Horn Island is a designated wilderness area. It’s undeveloped, except for a small ranger station, and has neither utilities nor a commercial ferry service.

Wells’s family is skeptical about the claim that he would willingly choose to separate himself from the group.

“We always taught him that if you go with a group, you stay with a group,” Elmore Wonsley, his father, said during the Good Morning America appearance. “If you go with five, you come back with five. Do not separate from the group. Because I always said: ‘Safety is in numbers.’ So he knew to stay with this group, so why would he split from the group? I don’t know.”

Crump suggested that the claim by the Jackson county sheriff, John Ledbetter, that “no foul play was suspected,” made before the autopsy was completed was premature.

‘We just want to know what happened’

While Wells did not return from Horn Island, his phone did. The attorney also said that an investigation of Wells’s phone would be done mutually with local authorities, “with our experts and their experts”. Using Life360, a live location-sharing app, Wells’s mother tracked his phone to the home of one of the people with whom Wells had ridden on the boat, Crump said. When she retrieved the phone, messages had been deleted.

“When we made it home, my sister and I actually went through Nolan’s cellphone, particularly Snapchat, because that is so popular with the children,” she said at Friday’s press conference. “When we opened it up, there was nothing. There were no saved pictures, there were no snaps from that day and we did open it before the 24-hour expiration. We found that very concerning because anyone who’s ever been around Nolan will tell you, at social gatherings, he’s taking videos, he’s taking pictures.”

Wells’s keys were found at the home of one of the men with whom he was pictured, Elmore, his father, said.

“We just want to know what happened and why our baby didn’t come home,” Christine, Wells’s mother, said through tears at the press conference in New York.

The 18-year-old’s body was flown to Washington DC for an autopsy funded by Colin Kaepernick, Crump said. A state autopsy has been completed, but its results have not yet been released.

“At this time, too many questions remain unanswered, and the Wells family, concerned members of the Mississippi community and our nation deserve nothing short of a full, transparent, independent and timely investigation into the circumstances that led to Mr Wells’s disappearance and untimely death,” the Congressional Black caucus said in a statement.

Wells’s funeral services will be held on Monday at Center Pointe church in Ocean Springs; the actor and film-maker Tyler Perry is paying for the services.

What Happened?: Nolan Wells’ family is still...

What Happened?: Nolan Wells’ family is still searching for answers two weeks after the 18-year-old’s tragic death

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