EDITOR’S NOTE: Nolan Wells’ household and their lawyer are scheduled to look on NCS’s “First of All” with Victor Blackwell, which begins at 8 a.m. ET Saturday.
It’s been one week since Nolan Wells and his associates went on a Fourth of July journey to Horn Island – an uninhabited stretch of pristine wilderness off the Mississippi coast with no shelters, no facilities and no communications.
His associates made it again residence. Wells, a pupil and broad receiver at Southwest Mississippi Community College, didn’t. His physique was discovered by a National Park Service agent face-down in the water off the shoreline Monday morning.
Now, many questions stay unanswered: Why didn’t he return on the boat with his associates? Why didn’t he have his cellphone with him? Was Wells concerned in an altercation? Did he break off from his associates to talk with a woman on the island?
While the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department continues to be investigating, Wells’ death has stoked hypothesis and mistrust partly attributable to Mississippi’s fraught racial historical past, the incontrovertible fact that Wells gave the impression to be the solely individual of colour in a picture with associates on the journey, and an earlier remark from the sheriff saying he didn’t suspect foul play – however didn’t clarify why.
“This does not smell right,” the Rev. Al Sharpton mentioned at a information convention Friday. “Some people are saying, ‘Reverend, are y’all bringing in race?’ Well, we’re not bringing in race. But we’re not discounting race, either, because we don’t know what it is. So, to tell us, ‘Don’t rush to judgment saying it was racist’ is fine. But then I’m telling you, don’t rush to judgment saying it was not racism, because we do not know.”
But nothing about the case – aside from hypothesis about race – is especially uncommon, NCS legislation enforcement analyst Charles Ramsey mentioned. It’s fairly widespread for legislation enforcement officers to take every week or longer to collect all the mandatory proof and interviews to find out what precipitated a death.
Jackson County Sheriff John Ledbetter didn’t reply to NCS’s questions Friday, resembling whether or not all of Wells’ associates from the journey had been interviewed. But Ledbetter beforehand advised NCS affiliate WXXV, “It’s gonna take a lot of hard work” to get to the backside of this case.
Here’s what that work may entail:
It’s necessary to interview every of the associates Wells traveled with, anybody who was on the seashore at the time, and a woman he was purportedly speaking to on the island, Ramsey mentioned.
“They’ve got to interview them one at a time, individually, to make sure the story is consistent,” mentioned Ramsey, who beforehand led the Philadelphia and Washington, DC, police departments.
Attorney Ben Crump, who’s representing Wells’ household, mentioned he’s dismayed by the lack of clear particulars which have emerged in the case.
“A young woman he was talking to says that ‘Well, Nolan said he was going back to get on the boat with the boys.’ The boys say that Nolan told them he was going to stay and talk to the young woman. It’s a contradiction,” Crump mentioned.
One of the stranger components of the case includes Wells’ cellphone. Crump mentioned it’s weird for a youngster to not have his cellphone and famous that Wells’ dad and mom managed to search out the telephone earlier than police did.
The dad and mom mentioned location historical past information present in apps on the telephone left them with questions. They additionally expressed issues that messages or photographs might have been deleted from Wells’ telephone.
There’s additionally been hypothesis that Wells was in an altercation shortly earlier than he was reported lacking.
Wells’ mom mentioned her son was not a confrontational individual and prevented bickering.
“Nolan was not someone who liked fights, physical fights. He really didn’t even like arguments,” Christine Wonsley mentioned.
The 18-year-old’s physique was present in the water simply off the shore on the northwestern finish of Horn Island, Jackson County Coroner Bruce Lynd mentioned.
“The swimsuit he was wearing matched those that was in the photograph that he was last known to be wearing,” Lynd advised NCS on Friday.
Crump, the household’s lawyer, forged doubt on the notion that Wells might have drowned – saying the teen was a robust athlete and knew how one can swim.
But the barrier islands off the Mississippi coast have a historical past of highly effective currents and drowning deaths, the coroner mentioned.
“The currents are strong out there – especially on that end of the island,” Lynd mentioned. “There have been drownings out in the barrier islands many times over the years.”
There had been no instant, apparent indicators of foul play or trauma on Wells’ physique, the coroner mentioned. But attributable to the unsure circumstances, “we asked for an autopsy (at) the state medical examiner’s office so that they could do the full autopsy and be able to tell if there was any foul play or trauma,” Lynd mentioned.
The findings from that post-mortem – alongside with Wells’ trigger and method of death – will not be but obtainable, as the health worker’s workplace is ready for the outcomes of routine toxicology exams. And these can take days or perhaps weeks.
“I’ve waited as long as two, three weeks for toxicology,” Ramsey mentioned.
In the meantime, the household has launched its personal investigation into what might have precipitated the teen’s death.
Parents ship their son’s physique out of state for 2nd post-mortem
Crump mentioned he believes if Wells had drowned, someone would have seen him struggling or supplied assist – although drowning may be fast, silent and doesn’t always look like one might expect, the National Drowning Prevention Alliance says.
“It is not adding up. And that’s why the family, at their behest, we had an independent autopsy being performed,” Crump mentioned Friday.
“We had his body flown from Mississippi to Washington, DC, because his family wanted to make sure that they had a doctor who had no ties to Mississippi law enforcement to do an independent examination of their son’s body, and we are hopeful to get (those) results in the very near future.”
Ramsey, who’s Black, mentioned he understands why some Mississippians could be involved about whether or not race performed a task in Wells’ death or the investigation. He expressed deep condolences to the household for his or her immense tragedy.
But to this point, he mentioned, there’s nothing shocking about the timeline of this investigation and the way it’s continuing.
“It’s not unusual. What’s unusual is the degree of media attention,” he mentioned. “The only reason we’re having this conversation (is) it happened in Mississippi. He’s a Black kid, and he went out there with friends who happen to be White.”
There are quite a few attainable the explanation why Wells was not with his associates at the finish of the journey, Ramsey mentioned. And the potential circumstances surrounding Wells’ death aren’t restricted to foul play or unintentional drowning.
“There are all kinds of possibilities,” he mentioned. “You’d go nuts trying to speculate about every possible thing that might have happened. And the bottom line is it takes evidence to really kind of reconstruct what took place.”
Even if Wells drowned, “there’s a variety of reasons why an individual can drown,” Ramsey mentioned.
Much of the criticism, hypothesis and anger on social media this week got here after the native sheriff issued a press release saying, “no foul play was suspected.”
That might have been a poor selection of phrases that led to widespread misunderstanding, Ramsey mentioned. It might have been extra correct to say there have been no instant, apparent indicators of foul play – just like what the coroner advised NCS.
But till the outcomes of the autopsies are launched and investigators say what they imagine precipitated Wells’ death, anybody speculating or leaping to conclusions could be doing “a disservice to the family,” Ramsey mentioned.
At a information convention Friday, Wells’ mom tearfully described the two solutions she’s been eager for:
“We just want to know what happened and why our baby didn’t come home.”
NCS’s Devon M. Sayers, Maria Sole Campinoti, Chelsea Bailey, Ryan Young and Elizabeth Wolfe contributed to this report.