Uncovering what happened to Nolan Wells has been a question on everyone’s mind. The 18-year-old who was found dead on Horn Island, Mississippi, after the 4th of July weekend, has gained national attention as his family seeks answers on what happened to their son and how what was supposed to be a fun hangout with friends turned fatal. This week, Rep. Jasmine Crockett shared her thoughts on the ongoing case.
“I think that specifically as Black Americans in the United States right now, we are always going to question whether or not there is a racial motivation,” Crockett told TMZ. “But also, if you know the history of Mississippi, I think that you’d have to be blind not to question potentially what is happening, especially in the case of an 18-year-old who ends up deceased without cell phones, without any communication whatsoever with anybody prior to ending up deceased, and he was out with his Caucasian friends, and then law enforcement tells everybody, there’s no foul play to be suspected. Now, a blind man could see that there’s something to investigate, and so I want to applaud the legal team, Ben Crump, and his team, as well as his parents, for not giving up and accepting no as an answer.”
Since officials discovered Wells’ body on July 6, his parents, Christine and Elmore Wonsley, have acquired civil rights attorney Ben Crump to help in their quest for answers. Though Mississippi officials and Crump’s team are investigating the incident, no one has a clear answer on what happened to Wells. However, Crockett says she isn’t ruling out the possibility that race may have played a role in this case and in how it’s been handled.
“If you think that race is not something to look at, then you are not really trying to investigate,” she shared, calling out details of Wells’ white friends reportedly deleting their social media accounts and not sitting down with law enforcement. “It’s not even like law enforcement decided that they wanted to sit down and talk to them. They decided, ‘Oh, the little black boy ended up dead without his cell phone, without his friends going and telling his parents, oh, yeah, we got the cell phone.’ It looks like a racial thing to me, but, hey, maybe we’ll find out that it wasn’t.”
“I can tell you that race is absolutely playing a role, whether it had to do with his death, whether it had to do with the fact that maybe your friends left you to die, or your friends didn’t care that maybe you did die, or if it’s just in law enforcement, not feeling as if Nolan Wells was worthy of an actual investigation, but instead decided that there was no foul play, seemingly with no evidence, without talking to any witnesses,” Crockett continued. “That, to me, is where there are racial components to this, for sure. But I will not say that I know for sure that race played a role in his death.”
Attorney Crump and Nolan’s parents echoed these sentiments in a conversation with theGrio, emphasizing that the family deserves the same level of care and urgency.
“We just have not heard much from our local authorities,” she said. “We just want transparency and a very thorough investigation, just like they would do for anyone else.”
“If the roles were reversed, this investigation would be handled totally different,” Crump added. “We want a zealous investigation for our son, too. We want you to do for our son what you would do for anybody’s son and get to the bottom of this because it’s not adding up.
Ultimately, Nolan’s father, Elmore, encouraged social media critics to “put yourself in our shoes, you will want to know. No matter if you’re black, white, Asian, whatever. Whatever. You would want to know what happened to your child.”
