By Holly Yan, CNN
(CNN) — It’s been one week since Nolan Wells and his friends went on a Fourth of July trip to Horn Island – an uninhabited stretch of pristine wilderness off the Mississippi coast with no shelters, no facilities and no communications.
His friends made it back home. Wells, a student and wide receiver at Southwest Mississippi Community College, did not. His body was found by a National Park Service agent face-down in the water off the shoreline Monday morning.
Now, many questions remain unanswered: Why didn’t he return on the boat with his friends? Why didn’t he have his cellphone with him? Was Wells involved in an altercation? Did he break off from his friends to speak with a girl on the island?
While the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department is still investigating, Wells’ death has stoked speculation and distrust in part due to Mississippi’s fraught racial history, the fact that Wells appeared to be the only person of color in an image with friends on the trip, and an earlier comment from the sheriff saying he didn’t suspect foul play – but didn’t explain why.
“This does not smell right,” the Rev. Al Sharpton said at a news conference 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 – other than speculation about race – is particularly unusual, CNN law enforcement analyst Charles Ramsey said. It’s quite common for law enforcement officers to take a week or longer to gather all the necessary evidence and interviews to determine what caused a death.
Jackson County Sheriff John Ledbetter did not respond to CNN’s questions Friday, such as whether all of Wells’ friends from the trip had been interviewed. But Ledbetter previously told CNN affiliate WXXV, “It’s gonna take a lot of hard work” to get to the bottom of this case.
Here’s what that work could entail:
Key interviews
It’s important to interview each of the friends Wells traveled with, anyone who was on the beach at the time, and a girl he was purportedly talking to on the island, Ramsey said.
“They’ve got to interview them one at a time, individually, to make sure the story is consistent,” said Ramsey, who previously led the Philadelphia and Washington, DC, police departments.
Attorney Ben Crump, who’s representing Wells’ family, said he’s dismayed by the lack of clear details that 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 said.
Questions about Wells’ phone
One of the stranger parts of the case involves Wells’ cellphone. Crump said it’s bizarre for a teenager to not have his cellphone and noted that Wells’ parents managed to find the phone before police did.
The parents said location history data found in apps on the phone left them with questions. They also expressed concerns that messages or images may have been deleted from Wells’ phone.
There’s also been speculation that Wells was in an altercation shortly before he was reported missing.
Wells’ mother said her son was not a confrontational person and avoided bickering.
“Nolan was not someone who liked fights, physical fights. He really didn’t even like arguments,” Christine Wonsley said.
An area known for rough currents
The 18-year-old’s body was found in the water just off the shore on the northwestern end of Horn Island, Jackson County Coroner Bruce Lynd said.
“The swimsuit he was wearing matched those that was in the photograph that he was last known to be wearing,” Lynd told CNN on Friday.
Crump, the family’s attorney, cast doubt on the notion that Wells may have drowned – saying the teen was a strong athlete and knew how to swim.
But the barrier islands off the Mississippi coast have a history of powerful currents and drowning deaths, the coroner said.
“The currents are strong out there – especially on that end of the island,” Lynd said. “There have been drownings out in the barrier islands many times over the years.”
There were no immediate, obvious signs of foul play or trauma on Wells’ body, the coroner said. But due to the uncertain 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 said.
The findings from that autopsy – along with Wells’ cause and manner of death – are not yet available, as the medical examiner’s office is waiting for the results of routine toxicology tests. And those can take days or weeks.
“I’ve waited as long as two, three weeks for toxicology,” Ramsey said.
In the meantime, the family has launched its own investigation into what may have caused the teen’s death.
Parents send their son’s body out of state for 2nd autopsy
Crump said he believes if Wells had drowned, somebody would have seen him struggling or offered help – though drowning can 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 said 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.”
‘There are all kinds of possibilities’
Ramsey, who is Black, said he understands why some Mississippians might be concerned about whether race played a role in Wells’ death or the investigation. He expressed deep condolences to the family for their immense tragedy.
But so far, he said, there is nothing surprising about the timeline of this investigation and how it’s proceeding.
“It’s not unusual. What’s unusual is the degree of media attention,” he said. “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 numerous possible reasons why Wells was not with his friends at the end of the trip, Ramsey said. And the potential circumstances surrounding Wells’ death aren’t limited to foul play or accidental drowning.
“There are all kinds of possibilities,” he said. “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 said.
Much of the criticism, speculation and anger on social media this week came after the local sheriff issued a statement saying, “no foul play was suspected.”
That may have been a poor choice of words that led to widespread misunderstanding, Ramsey said. It may have been more accurate to say there were no immediate, obvious signs of foul play – similar to what the coroner told CNN.
But until the results of the autopsies are released and investigators say what they believe caused Wells’ death, anyone speculating or jumping to conclusions would be doing “a disservice to the family,” Ramsey said.
At a news conference Friday, Wells’ mother tearfully described the two answers she’s been longing for:
“We just want to know what happened and why our baby didn’t come home.”
CNN’s Devon M. Sayers, Maria Sole Campinoti, Chelsea Bailey, Ryan Young and Elizabeth Wolfe contributed to this report.
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