Nolan Wells' Best Friend Was Warned Not To Come

**Tony Brueski** (0:00)
This is HiddenKillers With Tony Brueski. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:07)
Warren Hudson did not go to his best friend's funeral. He'd known Nolan Wells since high school. He was out on the water with him on the 4th of July, and when they buried Nolan, Warren had to stay home. Because by then, according to his father, the family had taken thousands of death threats. His mother shut down her social media after strangers started coming for her younger children. Most of the other boys who were out there that day didn't make it to the funeral either. Nobody has been charged with anything in Nolan Wells' death. No evidence implicating any of those boys has been released by anybody at any point by any agency.
Other than an attorney with a twitter account that continues to post lies. And insinuate people that were closest to Nolan had something to do with his very death. It's quite a thing to say without any evidence pointing to it. Well, Tony, there's a history in Mrs. Well, Tony, there's a history in Mrs. Yes, there certainly is, and that's not being doubted. But is there a history of these boys, these friends, these close relationships that are almost familial with Nolan Wells? Is there a history there of hatred and racism and bigotry? No, no, no, there's actually not. That all started after he died when Ben Crump came to town.
Now, we don't know what's going on yet in this case. We don't have answers. We don't have an official autopsy, an official toxology back. And Mississippi has a horrific history going up to this day with not investigating the deaths of black people. They do. It's horrific. We've gone over it a thousand times on this show. I'm sure we will continue to.
But what is also horrific is accusing people who loved that young man, who were standing by that young man, who also lost their best friend of being the cause of his shuffling off of this mortal coil. That's pretty shitty when you don't really have anything that truly points to that other than wild, rampant speculation. Some of his best friends could not make it to that funeral because of the hate, not of which they had for their friend, but because of the hate which exists in this world. I hate that they were so desperately living above and not repeating the problems of the past.
Federal prosecutors have charged three separate people in connection with this case. Not one of them has been accused of having anything to do with Nolan's death. Nolan Wells was 18 He played wide receiver at Southwest Mississippi Community College on July 4th of 2026 He went out on the water with friends he'd known since high school, headed for Horn Island, a barrier island off the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The National Park Service is blunt about what's out there. Nothing. No shelter, no drinking water, no facilities, no communication. You get there by private boat or you don't get there at all. The boats came back that afternoon and that afternoon and Nolan didn't. The park ranger found his body two days later on July 6 along the shoreline near the island's northwest tip. He was the only black kid that was on that specific boat. Within hours, a version of what happened to him was circulating that no investigator had signed off on. July 6 matters for a second reason. The same day before an autopsy, before toxicology, before anybody had opened anything at all, Jackson County Sheriff, John Ledbetter, in all of his infamite wisdom said, no foul play had been identified. He said Nolan's friends were cooperating. He said people interviewed by investigators reported that Nolan had chosen to stay behind on the island, expecting to catch a ride back with somebody else. The timing has a problem buried inside it. Jackson County Coroner, Bruce Lind, had already asked that the autopsy be performed at the state medical examiner's office. He stated the reason was the condition the body was found in and the need to determine definitively whether there was any trauma or foul play. So on the same day, the county's public position was that no foul play had been identified and the county's official request was for somebody else to find out whether there was any. You can't know if there hasn't been if you haven't looked at the evidence yet. So that happened.
Those are the words of a sheriff. Those are not the words of the friends that weren't allowed to go to their friend's funeral.
But somehow that horrific misstep of making that statement gets tied back over to those boys.
There's exactly one document that settles the the trauma question here. The reaction that followed did not come out of nowhere. Mississippi has certainly earned it. Mississippi has earned it. Those close friends of Nolan Wells, we've yet to see anything that shows they earned any of the shit they're getting. January 23, Rankin County, a caller complained that two black men were staying at a house with a white woman, six white law enforcement officers who called themselves the Goon Squad, winning without a warrant according to federal prosecutors and the men's own guilty pleas. They handcuffed Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker and tortured them for close to two hours. They used stun guns and racial slurs. One deputy put a gun in Jenkins' mouth during a mock execution and it fired. Then they planted drugs and a weapon to cover what they'd done. In charges stood against both men for months. Federal sentences ran from roughly 10 to 40 The history runs back further than that for most of two decades. Dr. Stephen Hayne performed the bulk of Mississippi's criminal autopsies by some accounts well over a thousand a year. The National Association of Medical Examiners recommends no more than 250 Hayne has never passed the Forensic Pathology Board exam. He worked repeatedly alongside Dr. Michael West, a dentist selling bite mark analysis. Between them, their testimony helped convict LeVon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer for the deaths of two little girls. Neither man did it. Brewer went to death row. Brooks spent about 15 years in prison. Another man eventually confessed to both cases in a federal appeals court. Later described Hayne as discredited and said he had lied about his qualifications. So when a Mississippi sheriff announces that no foul play has been identified on the same day a body turns up and a lot of people say out loud that they don't buy it, that it's not hysteria, that's a population reading its own paperwork correctly.