Nolan Wells’ Family to Release Phone Forensics Report as Calls for Federal Probe Intensify
JACKSON, Miss. — Civil rights attorney Ben Crump is scheduled to release a forensic examination of Nolan Wells’ cellphone on Thursday, just days after a Mississippi grand jury declined to recommend charges in the 18-year-old Black college student’s death.
The planned release is the latest move by Wells’ family and its legal team to keep attention on a case that has become a flashpoint over race, transparency and local justice in the Deep South. Attorneys representing the family have called for transparency and asked that grand jury investigative materials and the official autopsy report be made public.
Crump released the final independent autopsy report Tuesday on behalf of the family and scheduled a livestreamed release of the cellphone report for Thursday. The grand jury had access to that information when it convened last week, according to its report, but the details of those findings have not been made public.
Wells’ family and their legal team have sharply criticized the grand jury report and have been working to keep the investigation open and active. They have asked federal authorities to examine the events surrounding Wells’ death. His body was found two days after he went with a group of mostly white friends on a boat trip to a barrier island for a July 4 party.
The high-profile death in a state with a long history of racial tension has sparked widespread speculation and suspicion. State and local officials, along with several of Wells’ white friends who became the target of that speculation, had hoped the grand jury report would quell critics. But in the immediate days after its release, there was little sign the suspicion was subsiding.
Wells’ parents and their lawyers voiced suspicions after Wells’ friends left the island without him, saying he wanted to stay behind and talk to a girl. Wells’ phone was on the boat that took him to the island, and his family and attorneys have expressed doubt that he would choose to stay behind without his phone.
They also raised concerns that the phone could have been tampered with, noting that there were no recordings or messages in the hours before he was last seen on social media apps his family said he avidly used.
Several of the grand jury’s written findings appeared aimed at dispelling those suspicions. The panel said Wells chose to stay behind, that leaving on different boats was common on crowded days on the island, and that it was not unusual for phones to be left on boats and eventually returned on the mainland.
The report also directly addressed the veracity of accusations against the white friends seen in a picture with Wells the day he went missing. The grand jury findings attempted to explicitly clear the people who left the island without Wells from any wrongdoing and to reject online interpretations of a call to a sea towing company that suggested an attack could be heard in the background as “not true and accurate.” A lawyer representing several of the friends said the report had lifted a weight from his clients.
The report said the grand jury found Wells’ death to be “consistent with drowning” and found that he had not been in a fight or altercation while on the island.
Both Crump and Wells’ parents questioned how the panel could determine Wells drowned when both the official and independent autopsies said the cause of death could not be determined. They said both also noted that Wells had unexplained blunt force trauma on the back of his head.
A witness testified to the grand jury that he saw Wells slip awkwardly off the side of a boat around 3:30 p.m. on July 4, but that Wells continued to socialize after the fall and did not appear injured, according to the report. The panel said it could not determine whether the fall caused the bruising on Wells’ body, but noted the bruising was not a fatal injury.
At a news conference Tuesday, Wells’ mother, Christine Wonsley, Crump and representatives of the NAACP called for an independent investigation by the U.S. Justice Department. The grand jury report noted that federal law enforcement had been involved in the investigation, but it was unclear what role they played or the extent of their participation.
“What we have learned is that we still have no answers,” Wonsley said. “And the report reinforced the fact that Nolan was not given a thorough, transparent and honest investigation.”
With the grand jury declining to recommend charges, the pressure now shifts to independent forensic reviews and federal authorities. The family says the phone examination and autopsy findings raise questions that remain unresolved, while officials who welcomed the grand jury report argue it should settle key disputed accounts. The case continues to draw national scrutiny, underscoring broader concerns about how high-profile deaths involving race are investigated in Mississippi.