Nolan Wells' Friends Left Him On An Island With THIS

**Tony Brueski** (0:02)
This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Dre.

**Tony Brueski** (0:09)
An 18-year-old takes a boat out to Horn Island on the 4th of July, along with about 300 other people. A lot of them kids he grew up with in OceanSprings, teenagers, young people out doing what young people do.
Two days later, a park ranger finds his body in the water off the northwestern tip of that very island. The friends came home, Nolan did it. Almost every message we've gotten comes down to one question. How do you leave somebody's child on an island 10 miles from shore? That's the big one. Today, we're going to go through your questions, so be sure to drop them in the comments as we're doing this live. If you're catching this after we air it, drop your questions there too. We read them all throughout the day, and we will try to address them here as we work through the stories. We continue to cover it.
The links are in the description, sub-stack YouTube, some of the best places to do it. If you're watching this live, Axe, Facebook, all that. Let us know your thoughts. Robin Drake, retired FBI Special Agency for the Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program with us. As always, yeah, not a lot over the weekend. There's going to be some movement on this this week. Without a doubt, we're likely to see possibly the autopsy results. There's a grand jury convening that doesn't mean something criminal is happening here. Just means that's how they look at any sort of case where there's some questions involved. So there's going to be some pivotal things likely happening this week. I'm not going to speculate on those yet because we just don't know if they could go any which way. We'll follow them wherever they go. I want to address some of the questions that are still out there and really kind of just parse through them because it's easy in this case, the more I talk about it, the more I'm digging, it is easy to get on to one train and start riding it this way. And you're like, well, wait a second, let me jump over here and see it this way. Oh, okay, you're making a lot of sense too. And then, but they're both going very divergently different ways. But if you really look at both of them, there's certainly valid questions on every side of this and valid thoughts on every side of this. The problem is, we just don't know the answers.
I keep coming and thinking about the boat ride home. A lot of people are, somebody looked around, somebody saw he wasn't there. And that's not even a question. From what we understand, the boys were under the understanding, again, according to them, we're going off of what that story is, that they were told, he said, I'm going to go get a ride back. I'm going to go after this girl over there. Even if Nolan said he'd catch another ride, everyone, parents, lots of people who aren't there, saying, you don't just leave, you just don't. Well, you just, and all that, whatever.
So why did every single one of them go? Why did they leave their friend back on the island? I think I have some pretty simple answers for it. I'm curious as to what your answer is for it.

**Robin Drake** (3:12)
So you said some lot of great things, as you always do, Tony. So valid questions, but we need to always maintain openness to conclusions because we just don't have all the facts and data yet. But on that question about leaving behind, let's go down the road of thought experiments with human behavior. Because it's easy, like you said, to go down these different paths, because how do we go down different paths? So we take a starting point and we start filling in details about what we think we would do in hindsight with 2020 without ever having to experience that ourselves. And what I mean by that is, the first time you go through a truly fear-motivated moment, you don't know what you're going to do until you move through that fear-motivated moment, you reflect, you say what I would do differently next time, and then you get a rep, and then you do do it differently next time. I know this, every single first responder out there knows this. The first time a cop pulls up to his first car stop, and things look a little different than he's facing in training, I can tell you fear hits them about what's this gonna do, what's this person doing, why's this person pull over to the side of the road this way? Until you start establishing a pattern of behavior and that fear is no longer fear, it becomes experience.