Nolan Wells' family seeks answers two weeks after death on island

Mother describes finding deleted messages on teen’s phone

The Jackson County Sheriff’s Office continues to investigate the death of Nolan Xavier Wells, whose body was discovered on Horn Island two days after he disappeared during a July 4 outing with friends. The 18-year-old’s family has publicly challenged the handling of the case, citing missing phone data and conflicting accounts of his final hours.

Wells, a freshman at Southwest Mississippi Community College, traveled with a group of friends to the barrier island off the Mississippi Gulf Coast. About 300 young adults gathered there for what one friend described as a “last hurrah” before returning to school or work, according to the Guardian. Wells’s parents had planned to take him to football camp the following Monday.

The family’s search for answers began when Wells’s mother, Christine Wonsley, tracked his phone using the Life360 live location-sharing app to the home of one of the people with whom Wells had ridden on the boat, Crump said. When she retrieved the phone, she said, 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,” Wonsley said at a press conference on July 10 in New York. “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, his father, Elmore Wonsley, said.

Crump questioned the statement by Jackson County Sheriff John Ledbetter that “no foul play was suspected,” a determination Crump argued was made before the autopsy was completed. The attorney also said that the friends who accompanied Wells to the island have retained lawyers and that his investigators have not attempted to speak with them yet.

“We are in Mississippi,” Crump said on July 19 at the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church outside Atlanta. “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.”

An account from Tracestin Shepherd, who said he was a friend of Wells and was on the island on July 4, 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 with no utilities or commercial ferry service, only a small ranger station.

Wells’s family expressed skepticism about the claim that he would have chosen to separate from his group.

“We always taught him that if you go with a group, you stay with a group,” Elmore Wonsley said during an appearance on Good Morning America. “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.”

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, according to a statement. She said 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.

The Congressional Black Caucus said in a statement that “too many questions remain unanswered” and called for “a full, transparent, independent and timely investigation into the circumstances that led to Mr Wells’s disappearance and untimely death.”

Wells’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.

Wells’s funeral services were scheduled for Monday at Center Pointe Church in Ocean Springs. The actor and filmmaker Tyler Perry is paying for the services.