At a Thursday press conference in Orlando, Florida, Attorney Ben Crump gave further insight into the communication and location contents of Nolan Wells’ phone at a press conference in Orlando, Florida on Thursday. Crump stated that the findings were “telling and enlightening.”
Nolan Xavier Wells, 18, was celebrating the Fourth of July with friends on Horn Island, located off the coast of Mississippi. His friends returned to the mainland without him.
The following day, his mother, Christine Wells-Wonsley, realized she had not heard from him and repeatedly called his phone. He did not answer.
Later that evening, she received a call from one of Wells’ friends asking where he was. Wells-Wonsley believed he was still with his friends. His body was found near the island the following day, July 6, according to Jackson County Sheriff John Ledbetter. Questions about Wells’ whereabouts and the accounts provided by those around him have continued throughout the investigation.
In the months leading up to the grand jury decision, inconsistencies surrounding Wells’ whereabouts became a central point of public discussion. According to The Guardian, Wells-Wonsley initially referenced the Life360 tracking app during a conversation with one of Wells’ friends.
The app showed Wells as being back at his residence in Ocean Springs. His friend reportedly told her that Wells had remained on the island with a girl he had met that day.
Early Tuesday morning, McIlrath announced that the grand jury had returned a “no true bill,” meaning the grand jury declined to indict anyone based on its determination that there was insufficient evidence to bring criminal charges. McIlrath then notified Wells-Wonsley of the result by text message, according to information presented at the press conference.
“Jackson County District Attorney Angel Myers McIlrath will have you accept that Nolan Wells’ death can be summarized in three words: ‘We’ll never know,’” Crump said at Tuesday’s press conference. “But Nolan’s family offers three other words: ‘We’ll never stop.’”
According to the semi-redacted Jackson County grand jury report, the grand jury consisted of 23 people: 13 men and 10 women ranging from their late 20s to late 60s. The panel included 12 white people, five Black people, one person of Asian descent, two people of Hispanic descent, two Native Americans and one person who identified as “other.” The jurors were selected earlier this year. The grand jury first met regarding the case on Sept. 14 and was dismissed Sept. 18.
Thursday’s conference brought long awaited clarity to two essential aspects of the case, the location of Nolan’s phone and the messages within it alongside the results of Mississippi’s official autopsy report.
According to the conference, Wells rarely communicated through traditional text messages and primarily used Snapchat and Instagram. His Snapchat activity and GPS data helped Andrew Garrett, a digital forensic expert, and his team establish a timeline of Nolan’s communications and phone location before and after his death.
Garrett manually reviewed Wells’ traditional text messages and Snapchat activity to determine how he primarily communicated with others. According to Garrett, forensically copying a phone takes up to two hours. However, the extraction took 30 hours. He found that Wells primarily communicated with his friends through Snapchat and Instagram.
It was discovered that Snapchat messages were deleted from his account.
“I can’t talk to intent,” said Garrett. “Unfortunately, that’s not my field of expertise, the psychology but I can tell you from a digital standpoint things were deleted on the phone from the time he last had the phone, up until the time that his parents got the phone.”
The phone records have become a point of interest in the case due to questions surrounding Wells’ whereabouts and the people he was with before his death.
According to Crump, messages recovered from the phone also showed that some of Wells’ friends had concerns about people on Horn Island, including concerns that they could be racist and unsafe. The identities of those friends have not been confirmed by authorities out of concern about their privacy and safety.
Some of the messages talked about two “sketchy” people and how one of the sheriff’s told Nolan’s father that he “wouldn’t want to be left alone with them, especially if they’re really drunk.”
The extraction of the cell phone was originally designed to be a joint extraction. According to Attorney Liza Parks’ statement at the conference, on July 15, there was a meeting between the parents of Nolan Wells and the District Attorney in Mississippi at the DA’s office.
This meeting was the first time that the family and their representatives met with the DA and it was agreed upon by both parties that the extraction would be done together in Mississippi. The extract was set to happen one time in a community college in partnership with the DA.
It was later revealed that the building that the extraction would have been done in was “under the authority of the law enforcement”. This means the Wells-Wonsley’s, the attorney’s nor former law enforcement would not have been able to join a joint extraction in that facility. The DA was given the extraction information but attorneys Ben Crump and Liza Parks are unsure how it was presented to the grand jury, if at all.
The grand jury believed that Well’s death was consistent with drowning. However, Park revealed that the autopsy found no water in his throat, lungs or stomach. The updated autopsy introduced new information about Wells’ injuries, stating that he experienced “blunt-force trauma to the head.” The grand jury ultimately concluded that Wells died by drowning. The Wells family and Crump have questioned the speed of the grand jury’s decision and have called for the investigation to continue.
“We won’t quit until we get to the truth,” said Crump at Thursday’s conference. “Today is another step on the journey to get to truth because I understood with our legal team to get to the truth of what happened to Nolan Wells on day one, it was going to take primarily two things…courage and experts.”
The verdict has drawn disappointment and questions from Wells’ family, Crump and many others, inside and outside the USC community. Some people have described the presence of Mississippi’s racial history to be a factor, while others have reflected on the qualities of racial friendship dynamics, as Nolan’s friends are a huge aspect of his case.
“You need to make sure they’re not going to be a friend who takes from you but is willing to actually support you and go to war for you,” said Dwight Thomas, a licensed mental health professional and established Tiktok cultural commentator. Referencing author and former educator Dr. Bettina Love about the idea of being an ally versus a coconspirator, he said, “Being an ally is not enough and that’s why it’s hard as a teenager to navigate [racial friendship dynamics].”
Thomas has been closely monitoring and informing his audience of the case.
Students from the Center for Black Cultural and Student Affairs at USC said they were disappointed by the decision but not shocked.
“I’m disheartened, but I’m not surprised,” said Bryant Wilson, “There have been a lot of cases where something has clearly happened to young Black boys and young Black men and no one does anything about it.”
Brandon Myers, a junior pursuing a bachelor’s degree in health promotion and disease prevention said the decision demonstrated the difficulty of achieving progress on issues involving race and the justice system.
“I think [the grand jury results] reinforce the fact that making progress in this country is never a linear thing but an uphill battle,” Myers said. “As a man from the South, Memphis, Tennessee, I understand how politics works down South. The laws aren’t made for us. They are made against us and we have to continue to push back.”
Jared Darby, a senior public relations major said Wells’ story reminded him of his own experiences growing up.
“While I grew up in Cali, I went to high school in Texas. I was the only Black kid on the football team, so I can kind of resonate to the story to a certain extent,” Darby said. “It’s just tragic.”
The Wells family and Crump have continued to call for additional investigation despite the grand jury’s decision. Dr. Roger Mitchell is expected to provide additional medical insight next week in Atlanta, Georgia.
Though Wells’ family offered three words, “We’ll never stop”, Derby offered four.
“Vengeance is the Lord’s.”
Edited by Scott Hills and Katherine Contreras Hernandez.