ORLANDO, Fla. – Civil rights attorney Ben Crump said Thursday that new forensic findings could shed light on the death of 18-year-old Nolan Xavier Wells. During a news conference in Orlando, Crump presented cell phone GPS records, recovered Snapchat messages and information from the state medical examiner’s autopsy.
Wells, a Black college freshman and football scholarship athlete, vanished during a July 4 boating trip to Horn Island off Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. His body was discovered two days later at the island’s northwestern tip.
A Jackson County grand jury recently declined to bring charges, concluding that the available evidence was consistent with drowning.
Crump’s team partnered with Andrew Garrett of Orlando-based Garrett Discovery to examine Wells’ phone, recovering more than 1 million data artifacts. Garrett used GPS information to reconstruct the phone’s movements on July 4, following it from a morning stop at McDonald’s to Horn Island and then to a boat ramp that evening.
“We have every moment of Nolan’s phone from morning to night,” Garrett said.
According to Garrett, Wells’ phone registered movement back on the mainland after the group departed Horn Island, even though friends said Wells had decided to remain there. Garrett also said some of the phone activity took place after Wells’ death but before his parents recovered the device.
Investigators also manually recovered 282 pages of deleted Snapchat messages from Wells’ friend groups and turned them over to the Jackson County district attorney. Garrett said data was deleted from the phone after Wells was last known to have possessed it.
“In order for that to be done, somebody had to take a user action to delete data,” Garrett said.
Crump said the recovered Snapchat conversations included concerns among Wells’ friends about whether people on Horn Island could be racist. “That’s his friends discussing that on Snap,” Crump claimed.
The state medical examiner’s autopsy identified two contusions, each measuring roughly two inches, on the back of Wells’ skull. It found no water in his lungs, airways or stomach. Both the state medical examiner and independent forensic pathologist Dr. Roger Mitchell classified the cause of death as undetermined.
“We don’t know what happened to Nolan Wells,” Crump said. “If you know anything, come forward.”
Crump also referenced a news conference tentatively planned for next Thursday in Atlanta, where Mitchell is expected to present and explain both autopsy reports in detail.
