July 9, 2026

Family Demanding Answers In Mysterious Death Of 18-Year-Old Black College Football Player

Family Demanding Answers In Mysterious Death Of 18-Year-Old Black College Football Player

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump is now representing the family of 18-year-old Nolan Wells who went missing on the Fourth of July. The college football player set out on a boat with a group of white friends to party with other young adults off the coast of Mississippi. His body was found days later off Horn Island with no explanation of how he ended up dead, in the water. As the family awaits results of an independent autopsy, police are asking anyone with videos or photos from the island party to immediately contact authorities.

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00:00:02
Speaker 1: Hey there, folks. It is Thursday, July ninth, and the mystery continues surrounding the death of an eighteen year old black teen who went missing on the fourth of July and was later found dead. This all happened in Mississippi. Ben Crump is now involved, and with that, welcome to this episode of Amy and TJ. Robe. That's where we are. When people here. When we hear Ben Crump is involved in a case, our ears go up a little bit and we get a little more curious. But Robes, there have been some questions and a mystery surrounding this death, and the mystery just deepens.

00:00:38
Speaker 2: It really does. We're talking about eighteen year old Nolan Wells. He's a football player at Southwest Mississippi Community College. His picture is everywhere. This good looking, smiling kid who had a bright future went off to celebrate with friends. And the pictures that we can see as he was heading out to a place called Yoorn Island in Mississippi where a bunch of kids we're partying having fun on the fourth of July, and you can see him on this boat surrounded by a group of white friends getting ready to have some fun to celebrate independence. Day and at three pm I believe that's the last time anyone reports seeing him, and then it's as if he vanished. There is really no explanation after that as to what happened to him.

00:01:29
Speaker 1: So the kid was found dead a couple days later, autopsy being performed, but we don't have an idea from the officials, at least in Mississippi, when that's going to be completed. So as at this point, a healthy eighteen year old football playing college student is dead and we do not know why. Now enter ben Crump. Ben Crump, of course, noted civil rights attorney, nationally known civil rights attorney, has gotten involved because Robes and you know what, I'll let him and use his words. He said, there's a question here. This is simple enough. There was a black teenager dead in Mississippi, and when he died, he was surrounded by white teenagers there in town. Ben Crump is simply saying, we don't necessarily trust Mississippi, given history, to faithfully and fully investigate when some of the potential people who were involved in this were all white kids. That is what he said. We'll read you the exact quote. That's paraphrasing, but I'm not taking any liberties. That's what he suggested.

00:02:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, and there is conflicting information about who he was with, where he was going, was he getting on the boat, was he staying back to hang out with a girl. Different people are saying different things, and so there are reasonable questions about who he was last with and was there an altercation. There are videos now circulating on social media where it seems like there was some sort of an argument that was taking place on this beach where you could hear someone cursing at someone, and it appears he was in that group of folks. But this was a bustling area. I mean, looking at the video, it's hard to imagine someone just disappears. There were a lot of dozens and dozens of kids.

00:03:14
Speaker 1: And this is the middle of the day.

00:03:15
Speaker 2: This is the middle of the day, three pm, fourth of July. People have pulled all these kids have pulled their boats up to this island. And we'll describe this island. It's just kind of like a barrier island. There's nothing on it, but it's a place where kids go to get away probably from adults and parents, and just have some fun, let loose, you parcialize.

00:03:35
Speaker 1: Park your boat, you hang and you drink and you socialize. That's rrect. That's it. So there's no development, there are no restaurants. Will give you an idea. This is not what we're talking about. This is just kind of a little area. Was it ten miles they say, off the coast of Mississippi there that people go to hang Horn Island. It sounds like, so, oh, maybe I'll go visit.

00:03:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's ita. Yeah, kids pull up your Horn Island. Yeah, there's no hotel, there's nothing there. In fact, it's an island. It's part of the Goal Islands National Seashore and it's managed by the National Park Service. I mean there's nothing on there. And they described this it's only accessible by private boat and according to the website, there is no staff, no drinking water, no shelter, no facilities, and no communication on the island. So it's just this party island that kids pull up to to drink beer and have some fun.

00:04:23
Speaker 1: Sounds like a blast, sounds like a good.

00:04:24
Speaker 2: Time, And it looked like there was huge amounts of people there.

00:04:27
Speaker 1: You think you're fairly safe ropes. Yeah, because you are surrounded by people who are like minded, things can't happen. But robes. This isn't I can't remember where it was, but there was a college student went off a spring break.

00:04:39
Speaker 2: It was in Spain.

00:04:39
Speaker 1: Was that Spain fell into the water right in the middle of the night. There was a lot of drinking, that's one thing. This was not that. I don't even know how given the pictures roll up and what they describe. He could even have gone off alone by himself somewhere, just not places to do it necessarily.

00:04:54
Speaker 2: No, it's just tiny Barrier Island where a bunch of kids were there partying and it did look like they're There was a disturbance on the beach in a group where it sounded like there was some shouting going on.

00:05:08
Speaker 1: See that's I couldn't make that out, folks. So that video is going around and it sounded like I heard one F bomb, Yeah, what the F?

00:05:14
Speaker 2: Aren't the f something like that?

00:05:16
Speaker 1: And I know people are looking at that and they had to slow it down and point and you can't make him out. They say, he's in that group and you can't tell what's happening. But yes, we have so few answers rogues that videos like that. The police are begging people with videos they know all these young folks out there, tons of videos, tons of pictures. Please, if you have anything, send it to us that might have this kid in it. So that video you're talking about, Robes is making the rounds and suggesting that has something to do, but we just don't know, because we don't know anything.

00:05:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you've got to think you've got a bunch of college students, young college students with their phones out partying, taking selfies and videos. You can with the amount of kids, dozens and dozens of kids were there. I don't have the exact count, but it was a party. There have to be so many videos and photos and they're going to be going through.

00:06:09
Speaker 1: All of that.

00:06:10
Speaker 2: But they are absolutely asking anybody who was there on the fourth of July to please please please provide all social media, all videos, anything on your phone to police, because, yeah, they need to figure out what the hell happened on that island. Something happened. It's hard to imagine this strong football player drowning. They don't know, they don't have a cause of death, but the family does want answers. We should go ahead and probably read Bencrom's statement just to give you an idea of where he's coming from He put out, Nolan Wells was a beloved son, teammate, and friend who went out to celebrate the Fourth of July and never came home. His family deserves answers, They deserve the truth. We will not rest until every fact about what happened to Nolan on Horn Island is brought into the light, and we call on investigators to pursue this case with the urgency and transparency this family deserves well.

00:07:07
Speaker 1: That was the official written statement that he put out, but he did the interviews later TV interviews, and this is where I paraphrased it earlier, but this was the comment, and this is verbatim right out of his mouth.

00:07:19
Speaker 2: He said, we're trying to be very transparent because the family has some concerns about the state of Mississippi doing an investigation of the death of a young black man where young white students may be looked at as having some culpability. The family is concerned about that. We're going to have an independent autopsy. We have investigators talking to witnesses that have no alignment or no allegiance to that state, and that's important. And to that point, it's just now being reported that Crump and the family are flying this young man's body eight hundred miles to DC to have an independent autopsy done, and they expect those preliminary autopsy results to actually come as early as tomorrow on Friday, because they need to determine cause of death. And look, there are concerns that there was some sort of altercation. If there was an altercation that ultimately led to perhaps him drowning, hopefully his body will have some sort of evidence or some sort of forensic information that will give his family and prosecutors and police some idea as to where to take this investigation.

00:08:27
Speaker 1: And what did they say they found his body on Monday. I believe it was in the water just north of the island, is how they describe it. But they found his body in the water just off the edge. For some reason, I had the impression that he wasn't out in the middle of the water somewhere, but was very very near the island. So just how does this happen to an eighteen year old kids surrounded by everybody in the middle of the day. How did he ever? Did anybody lose sight of him long enough that something could have happened to him that nobody else saw and I thought it was bizarre. I guess he could tell his friends, I'm going to hang back, and he met some other people who doing something else. But why did his friends go back without him as well? That didn't make any sense.

00:09:04
Speaker 2: That's a big, big question. So when we come back, we're going to tell you what his friends, what the kids who he was out there with, have told police, and why even their accounts are confusing to both police and the family. And welcome back everyone to this episode of Amy and TJ, where a mystery is deepening and the family is demanding answers about a student athlete, a college football player, eighteen year old Nolan Wells, went out to go party with his friends on the fourth of July, meeting up with a bunch of other teens and young adults, and he never came home. That was Saturday, Monday. They found his body at the tip of this island, Horn Island, where the kids were all having fun, and there are a lot of questions. He went out there with a group of guys, you can see the photos on a boat, and he never returned. Everyone else returned, but Nolan didn't, and.

00:10:09
Speaker 1: So they leave him. What happened that they left.

00:10:12
Speaker 2: So the back and forth is that his friends decided to leave at three pm. That's the last time. He's sorry. They last saw him around three pm. They claimed he was talking to a girl and the friends that he came there with left at four point thirty pm, And they say it's because their boat was taking on water. They had some issue with a pump, and so they realized that the boat was not going to last, so they needed to get it back to shore. They needed to get it back inland, and so they claimed that they were like, hey, dude, we got to go, and he decided to stay back, they claim with another group of friends.

00:10:51
Speaker 1: But here's the interesting party of friends. I'm sorry that we might not have this detail, but of friends, random folks. Though these are folks our understanding, as he knew them as well.

00:11:00
Speaker 2: Well. That is unclear. What also was unclear. They claimed that he was talking to a girl and that was the motivation potentially for him to stay back, because he wanted to hang out with the girl. The girl is saying that he said had told her he was going back with his friends, going back inland. So there is a big discrepancy as to why he stayed, who he was staying back to hang out with And if there's just a miscommunication, or if there's something more sinister that was going on that these kids don't want to talk about, we don't know.

00:11:37
Speaker 1: And that's everything about this case. I mean, what is it. We do know he went and he didn't come back. That's kind of it. We don't know what what And some of these kids could be confused and not telling the story right or had an understanding that he was doing this so that they could all be telling the truth, or as Ben Crump said, we need some answers and do you trust. Look, well, there's history here, and it stays in the back of people's minds, and black folks in particular. And yes, one black kid surrounded by nothing but white kids ends up dead. Mississippi handled this investigation for the family.

00:12:15
Speaker 2: I can understand the extreme level of distrust, historic distrust that has to be understood by just about everybody that makes sense. And look, this young man, he was about to turn nineteen. He was turning nineteen next month. And yes, we mentioned he was a football player. He played wide receiver at Southwest Mississippi Community College. But his high school coach, this is what just makes it so unbelievably. Sad described this young man as a happy, go lucky kid with a big smile that everybody adored and loved. His high school coach said he was a talented athlete, a conscientious student, a respectful person, and he added, this is his quote, if you've got kids, you want your kids to be like Nolan. It's just devastating.

00:13:02
Speaker 1: That was the one to hear from a parent or a coach or a caregiver that this was an exemplary kid that you actually want your kid to be. And that's a big statement. I know we say nice things about people when they when they passed, but that was a that was the one that stood up. It's hard. We all love our kids, we think they're perfect a lot of times, right, especially when they're younger. But to think this is one you would want your kid to be like. That says something to parents, and that's just tough to hear.

00:13:29
Speaker 2: I get chills thinking about just the unbelievable, unnecessary, tragic loss of it all. And also something that stuck with me reading about the team that found his body, because they had been searching for him all day Sunday and it wasn't until Monday that they ultimately found his body. But one of the guys from the United Cajun Navy, it's a volunteer organization that ended up assisting in the search for Nolan, and he said he was flying a plane over Horn Island looking for his body. And he said they were setting up a tactical operations center or a command post on the beach. And shortly afterwards, I started getting texts from my guys on the ground that they that they recovered a body that they believed was Nolan's, and he said, I wanted to bring him back to his mother alive, and well, I knew that the further we got away from the last time he was seen alive, the lower the chances would be. Just how devastating it was for him and his team to get the horrific news that yes, he was found, but he was found dead in the water. It was the last thing anybody wanted to find. And it was just incredibly demoralizing and devastating to find him and knowing they were going to have to let his mother know that he had died. It's just it's so unbelievably sad, and his family does deserve answers, and there are important questions that should be asked that need to be asked in this case for sure, and so hopefully they'll get some of those answers tomorrow at least with these preliminary autopsy reports.

00:15:06
Speaker 1: And it could this could be an awful accident, and that's the end of it. It could be, but there's no family who would accept this right now. Not right now, you wouldn't just accept. And then police aren't saying they don't know. They haven't said it's just an accident, or he just he drying. Nobody knows right now, so they are just making sure they trust the answers they are getting and from where they're getting them.

00:15:34
Speaker 2: Man, that's okay, And that is okay because I think every single person, especially every parent out there, totally gets it. You need to know the truth. You need to know what happened. And sometimes we can't just accept what people assume happened. We have to find out if anything happened other than just a terrible accident. So we will absolutely stay on this story and bring you the very latest developments coming from Mississippi and of course from that autopsy being performed in DC right now until then, though, we always appreciate you listening to us. Everyone, I'm Amy Roebach alongside t J. Holmes. We'll talk to you soon.