NEW YORK (AP) — A week ago, 18-year-old Nolan Xavier Wells took a boat trip with friends to celebrate the Fourth of July on an island off Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. He never came back.
Two days later, he was found dead. What happened, Wells' parents say, is a mystery riddled with conflicting stories, implausible explanations and missing details. It is a case shadowed by the state's fraught racial history and lingering distrust in law enforcement.
At
a news conference Friday in New York City, Christine and Elmore Wonsley called for a thorough and transparent investigation into their son’s death, skeptical of claims that Wells told his friends to leave the island without him and suggestions that he, an elite athlete who knew how to swim, had accidentally drowned.
Wells’ body was found early Monday along the shore of Horn Island, about 7 miles (11.2 kilometers) off the Mississippi coast, more than a day after he was last seen alive. The roughly 11-mile long (17.7 kilometer) spit of land is near the Alabama state line. The island is uninhabited and accessible only by boat. About 200 people were there on July 4, the family’s lawyers said.
“We just want to know what happened and why our baby didn’t come home,” Christine Wonsley said, looking upward several times as she stood alongside her lawyer, Ben Crump, and the Rev. Al Sharpton, who will officiate Wells’ funeral.
Crump said Wells' family has commissioned an independent autopsy, performed by a forensic pathologist in Washington, D.C. with no ties to Mississippi law enforcement, while they await the results of an official autopsy, which could take weeks. They also plan to employ experts to recover messages that appeared to have been deleted from his cellphone, Crump said. They will eventually turn the device over to authorities, he said.
Wells' family also encouraged witnesses to come forward and asked people to submit any video they recorded that may show him on Horn Island, echoing a call by the Jackson County Sheriff's Office to help shed light on the moments before Wells’ disappearance and death.
A photo posted on social media, purportedly from the boat ride to the island, shows Wells with his arms around three white male friends. Sheriff John Ledbetter said Wells’ friends were cooperating and that investigators don’t suspect foul play. Crump said those friends now have lawyers and that his investigators haven't attempted to speak with them yet.
Wells' death has led to rampant speculation and suspicion as people grapple with Mississippi's history of racial tension and what it means to be a Black person in a majority white space.
Actor and producer Tyler Perry is helping pay for Wells' funeral, former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick is helping pay for his independent autopsy, and filmmaker Spike Lee showed up to the news conference to show support for Wells' family.
Crump said Wells' parents hired him to conduct an independent investigation into their son’s death because they don't trust that law enforcement officials will perform a fair inquiry in a state still reckoning with its Jim Crow past, including the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till and the murders of three civil rights workers in the 1960s.
“The history of Mississippi is something that they don’t just read about in books,” Crump told reporters at Sharpton’s National Action Network headquarters in Harlem. “It's a lived experience for many Black Americans that oftentimes when our children are killed in highly questionable situations that there is this notion that ‘Oh, there was nothing wrong, no foul play, let’s just sweep it under the rug.’ Well, we refuse to sweep it under the rug.”
It is the second case that Crump has taken on in the state in recent months. He also was recently retained by the family of a Mississippi 1-year-old who was killed when police fired into a moving car.
Ledbetter told The Associated Press this week that investigators suspect that Wells “chose to stay on the island with the assumption that he was going to ride back to the mainland with someone else.”
But Wells didn't have his cellphone or his keys — his friends did.
“What teenager would leave their phone behind if they’re going to stay on this island? What teenager wouldn’t take their phone?” Crump said. “It’s not adding up at all.”
Crump said bystander video from the island showed a person he said was Wells arguing with someone to give him his phone back. In another discrepancy, Crump said that a witness reported Wells had planned to leave on the boat with his friends, contradicting the sheriff's theory.
“The friends come back and he's left there with some story about how he said leave him behind,” Sharpton said. “But then by some magic one of the friends has his keys and his phone.”
The sheriff did not return The Associated Press' messages seeking his response to the family's concerns.
Wells’ mother, Christine Wonsley, said she started to worry when a friend of his called her just after 11 p.m. on July 4.
After trying to track him down on her own, she reported him missing to police and went with her husband to meet an officer in a McDonald’s parking lot, she said, a process exacerbated by a dispute over which law enforcement agency had jurisdiction over the island. One of Wells’ friends had also reported him missing to the U.S. Coast Guard.
Wells’ father, Elmore Wonsley, said he went out on a boat on the morning of July 5 looking for his son near Horn Island. Crews from multiple local and state agencies began an extensive search, and his body was recovered early Monday, family members confirmed.
“If he’s drowning, nobody sees him drown? Nobody offers assistance? Nobody tries to help? I mean, obviously he stands out," Crump said. "I think he’s the only Black person I saw when I’m looking at the videos.”
Christine Wonsley said she used an app to track his phone and, after a friend went to where it was on land to pick it up, noticed that some of his messages appeared to be deleted. Wells, a shutterbug at social and family events, had two Snapchat accounts — but both were devoid of pictures or saved messages, she said.
As they searched for their son, Elmore Wonsley went to retrieve Wells' keys from the home where he stayed with his friends from the boat the night before their island trip. He said his son's car was still parked in the yard.
Wells, who would have turned 19 next month, played wide receiver on the football team at Southwest Mississippi Community College in Summit, Mississippi, and had aspirations of playing at a high-level Division I program.
His coach, Les George, told WAPT-TV that Wells “was a guy that never had a bad day. Never.”
“He was very sociable with everyone, didn’t meet a stranger,” George said. “He would pop up at my office and come sit on the couch just to hang out and talk.”
Christine Wonsley said she and her husband schooled Wells in history and talked to him about navigating the racial tensions that still permeate the South.
Wells was a peacemaker who didn’t like division, once breaking into a dance while still in diapers to ease tensions while his parents were arguing, they said. He wanted everyone to be included and shied away from confrontation.
“Nolan is a person with a big heart,” Elmore Wonsley said.
Wells' parents said they last saw him the night before the boat trip. He came to their house, baked them salmon for dinner and hugged his mother goodbye.
As people mourn and protest Wells' death, Christine Wonsley urged them to follow his example.
“Please be peaceful," she said. "Nolan was not someone who liked fights, physical fights. He didn’t even really like arguments. Don’t go out there trying to be tough. Think about what Nolan would want, and he wouldn’t want that type of behavior.”
