Nolan Wells’ autopsy inconclusive as family presses for answers in teen’s death

Independent exam of Black teen found cause and manner of death ‘undetermined’ as family questions timeline

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Nolan Wells’s cause of death and manner of death are both “undetermined, pending investigation”, according to an independent autopsy, announced on Wednesday by Wells’s family’s attorney, Ben Crump.

The results came nearly three weeks after Wells, an 18-year-old college freshman, was found dead.

The teen and a group of friends took a boat out to Horn Island, a barrier island a few miles off the Mississippi Gulf coast, on the Fourth of July. Wells’s friends returned from the outing; Wells did not. His family launched a missing person’s search for the teen that continued until his body was found on the island on 6 July.

During the press conference on Wednesday, Christine Wonsley, Wells’s mother, said that a member of the Cajun navy said that Wells was found fully clothed and face down. In the last known photos of the teen, he was not wearing a shirt.

Wells was Black, while many of the people on the island, including ones with whom he was pictured, are white. There were 300 to 400 people on the island, Crump said, something that made it difficult to believe no one knows what happened to one of the few Black people in attendance.

Due to a lack of information about what exactly happened to the teen, conversations about Wells’s case on social media are full of misinformation and online speculation. Black leaders, both locally and nationally, have called for transparency and clarity.

Wells was laid to rest in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, his home town, on Monday. Shortly after Wells’s body was found, the Jackson county sheriff, John Ledbetter, said he did not suspect foul play, something Wonsley said was premature during Wednesday’s press conference.

Speaking at the NAACP national convention in Chicago, Crump said that the preliminary autopsy noted Wells’s body, when received following the first autopsy, was missing its interior neck structures. He also said that there was significant “red discoloration” in the tissue in the back of the teen’s head for unknown reasons.

The independent investigators were not able to see the body when it was recovered, and, by the time it was received on 10 July, Wells’s body was so decomposed that it was difficult to determine whether or not he was bruised or decomposed.

The autopsy, which was paid for by the former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, was conducted by a former Washington DC, chief medical examiner, Dr Roger Mitchell. Wells’s body was received for the autopsy by Mitchell after the state of Mississippi did its own autopsy. The state of Mississippi has not yet released its autopsy results.

Wells’s friends told authorities that the teen decided to stay on the island, something that his parents find difficult to believe.

“We always taught him that if you go with a group, you stay with a group,” Elmore Wonsley, his father, said during a Good Morning America appearance. “If you go with five, you come back with five. Do not separate from the group. Because I always said: ‘Safety is in numbers.’ So he knew to stay with this group, so why would he split from the group? I don’t know.”

Film-maker Tyler Perry, who also paid for Wells’s funeral expenses, and the Rev Al Sharpton are offering a $100,000 reward for those who “could give the information that will lead to an arrest and a conviction in the case of what happened”.