How Did Nolan Wells End Up Alone on That Island?!

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:07)
The friends Nolan Wells went to Horn Island with came back without him. And when the Sheriff of Jackson County, Mississippi was asked how an 18-year-old ends up alone on an uninhabited island about 10 miles off into the Gulf, the answer was that the young man had chosen to stay. From what we understand, Sheriff John Ledbetter said he chose to stay there. That's as of this recording, the official explanation, he chose to stay. This was a young man who graduated from Ocean Springs High School and went to play college football as a wide receiver. He appeared to be the only person of color in the photograph of that boat trip, the one that's traveled everywhere since. And the story is that he chose to stay behind alone on an island with no houses and no way back except the boat that had already left. There's one document that could tell us how Nolan Wells actually ended up in the water. It's the autopsy. The state has finished it and the cause of death and the toxology haven't been released yet. That is still ongoing, at least as of this recording. So follow the logic because it matters. The people who've already decided this was murder don't have an autopsy. The people who've already decided this was a simple drowning. And that everyone else needs to calm down don't have an autopsy either. Nobody arguing about how Nolan Wells died actually knows how Nolan Wells died. A single piece of paper that answers the question is sitting sealed or is not yet even completed and the verdicts are coming in anyway from both angles.
The outline of what happened is just about all anyone has. So let's start there. On the 4th of July, Nolan Wells went out on a boat with a group of friends to Horn Island. In undeveloped Barrier Island, about 10 miles off the Mississippi Coast, south of Ocean Springs, people go there for the beaches on the northwest tip. The group of friends there that he went with, they all went and had fun. He didn't come back on the boat with them after the fun, though, allegedly. He was reported missing. And after a search by local, state and federal teams and a lot of volunteers, a park ranger found his body on July 6, off that same northwest tip of the island. When the official account of a death is that thin, he chose to stay. We're looking into it. People don't wait for more. They build their own account. And in this case, they've built two of them. And the two are now at war with each other. This take and that take, before any of that, though, is the fact that it's nothing to do with race and everything to do with competence. A friend of Nolan's called the Coast Guard around 11 o'clock on the night of the 4th. The people whose job it was to send the boats and the aircraft, they got around to asking them around lunch next day to go on out. Hey, you know, we got that call late last night. Maybe maybe it's maybe we should go look. Roughly 13 hours of the teenager missing on an island in open water in the dark. And the machine that's supposed to move didn't move. So there's there's that nugget over here. That delay is where the vacuum comes in. This is the same fight that breaks out every time a body turns up and the answers don't come fast enough. When a system is slow and a system is quiet, people don't read that as neutral. They read it as a signal and they pour theory into silence because a theory feels better than a shrug. Look at the Nancy Guthrie case. The sheriff hasn't even said publicly whether the water off that part of the island is considered dangerous. A Google search will tell you that though. And it is. Or whether swimmers are warned away from it. Why did he separate from the group? Why was he found without his phone? Every one of those blanks becomes proof of whatever you believed before you showed up. And the official language didn't help anything. Early on, the sheriff's office put out a statement saying, no foul play was suspected that one that that very one praise did more to fuel the cover up theory than anything the friends said or didn't say, because the coroner had actually said something narrower, that there was no immediate obvious signs of trauma on the body and then asked for a full state autopsy exactly because the circumstances were uncertain. Cross the T's, dot the I's. That's good. No obvious signs at first glance isn't the same as case closed. Nothing happened. No, it's well, here's initially what we have, but we ain't done yet.