On July 6, 18-year-old Nolan Xavier Wells’ body was discovered in Mississippi’s Horn Island. Since then, his family, friends, community members, and social media users alike have been trying to piece together the events that led to the teen’s passing during a trip with friends over Fourth of July weekend.
“We’re still grieving—like it it hasn’t even been that long—4 days since he’s been found,” Nolan’s mother, Christine Wonsley, said in an interview with Roland Martin. “I’m in a mindset right now where I’m trying to protect my family. I’m trying to protect my peace.”
During Fourth of July weekend, Wells went out to Horn Island with a group of friends. However, while all his friends made it home to their parents safely, Wonsley received a call from his friends alerting her that Wells was missing.
“They said that he wanted to stay and hang out with this girl named Katie. And also, and this was the initial conversation, me being alerted to him being missing. It was, ‘Oh, well, Katie’s also missing, but we don’t know who she is.’ Like, that was our first time kind of seeing her type of thing,” she said, recalling the phone call.
Wells was reportedly last seen with a young woman named Katie before his disappearance. Though someone related to Katie took to Facebook to dispel rumors that she was missing, the family’s attorney, Ben Crump, notes that one of the largest discrepancies lies in what happened after Wells spoke to Katie. According to Crump, one young woman said Wells had been speaking with her on Horn Island and told her he was going back to get on his friends’ boat. Meanwhile, his friends claim Wells told them he was going to stay back and talk to the young woman. The late 18-year-old’s best friend, Jayvon Williams who was also at Horn Island on July 4, told the Biloxi Sun Herald that he last saw Wells after 4 p.m, noting that Wells was hanging out with a girl and other friends during the trip, and that they both left their phones on the boat that Wells took to the island.
“The fact that you have the young lady who said that Nolan said he was going to get back on the boat with the boys, and then the boys said no, Nolan told them that he was going to stay with the girl. Which one is it? Somebody must not be telling the truth,” Crump told Martin. “And again, we cannot overstate it enough. What 18-year-old teenager says, ‘I’m going to stay behind on the island and don’t ask for their cell phone.’”
Nolan’s father, Elmore Wonsley, also shut down that narrative, stating, “He had too much at stake. He had a plan for his life. He knew what he wanted to do. He knew what he had to do come that following Monday, which was to get down to business so he can get his future started. So, for someone to tell me that Nolan decided to stay on the island to chase a girl. No one is going to get me to believe that.”
In addition to the conflicting stories surrounding Katie, Nolan’s parents have called out other discrepancies in their son’s case. Police reports listed Wells as wearing black shorts at the time of his disappearance, but Christine recalls a young woman who was at Horn Island reaching out with photos from that day showing him in blue shorts. The family also describes suspicious encounters with Wells’ friends when trying to retrieve the keys to his car, which was parked in one friend’s driveway. They had to track down his phone themselves, with help from a phone-monitoring app and a family friend. That same family friend and her sons also noticed something unusual: despite Nolan regularly updating his Snapchat, it showed no activity for the 24 hours leading up to his disappearance, and his account showed a location that didn’t match where his phone was foud.
“They didn’t voluntarily tell her they had his phone. They didn’t voluntarily say they had the keys,” Rev. Al Sharpton said in a press conference voicing his support for the family. “So, if they had not been tracked down, we don’t know if they’ve ever would have known where it was. Some of this doesn’t make sense.”
“We just want to know what happened and why our baby didn’t come home,” Christine concluded.
