Who Nolan Wells' Mom Served The Day She Buried Her Son

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

**Tony Brueski** (0:07)
Christine Wells-Wonsley got her son's phone back from his friends. She opened Snapchat, and Nolan had two accounts. Both of them were empty the day he was at the beach, she says. No photos, no videos, no messages, no saved stories, nothing. An 18-year-old college football player who otherwise documented everything he did, every hangout, every cookout, every road trip, and his Snapchat accounts looked like they had been created five minutes ago. There are explanations for empty Snapchat accounts that don't involve anyone touching his phone. There are explanations where it does involve people touching the phone. The answer is we don't know right now. The app auto-deletes messages by default. That is important to know.
There is a possibility that... Settings were changed, maybe he just wasn't using it that weekend, that seems to be the story. A lot of people are telling, people who knew him, people who didn't know him, people who were on the boat, people who were not on the boat, people who had never touched Horn Island, who just go out on boats on the weekend in water. That will easily tell you. Yeah, we pretty much all leave our phones on the boat. It's the one time. A week, one time, a month, a week We're, a month in the month, a one time month of the summer where there's no activity on the device because we're disconnected from it. There are reasonable explanations. Those are reasonable explanations. There are unreasonable explanations to things like that. But those are reasonable.
Someone getting a device. someone knowing his password to get into the device and then into his account and deleting it could also be a reasonable explanation. It's not like we haven't seen that in cases before. But it's important that we are reasonable about what we're talking about before we actually have facts. Understand these are all possibly reasonable explanations. How do we get to that explanation? Well, we got to go to the phone company. We got to go to Snapchat. We got to find out from them exactly what is going on. And that's what's happening right now.
So I'm not here to tell you his friends deleted things to cover something up. I'm also not here to tell you that he just didn't use his phone. I'm here to say we don't know.
But it is fair to ask the questions on both sides. It is.
Because what his mother found on that phone didn't match the kid that she raised and what she knew about him. That's a detail that changed the shape of this case for this family. Not because it proves anything, but because it left her with a question nobody in the system was answering. On July 29th, Christine filed court-ordered subpoenas against five major tech platforms through Jackson County Chancellery Court. Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, plus Snapchat, TikTok, and Life360. The GPS tracking app. The subpoenas demand subscriber information, direct messages, photos, videos, GPS location data, login histories, password reset records, and IP addresses tied to Nolan's account. The companies have 21 days to produce everything. These aren't polite requests of a grieving mother. Their court orders filed through her attorney at Carroll Buffkin, the Mississippi firm working alongside BenCrump. Here's the part that matters too. Whatever those accounts contained before they went empty, if they contained anything, may still exist on those company servers. What disappears from the phone doesn't disappear from the backend. His mother knows that and she's going after the backend. Good, good, good, good. Because things like that should not be left up for conjecture. That is good for everyone involved. It's good for mom to get answers. It's good for the people that are sitting out there being accused on the internet of doing something horrific.
Because facts are facts and if facts show us something questionable happened, we'll find that out. If facts show us, well, the phone was on the boat. He didn't touch it. That's why there's nothing there. We'll find that out too.
She had already found something that didn't add up. When she compared Life360's location data to Snapchat's location data for the same time period, the two apps told different stories about where people were. Two platforms, two different versions of the same night. And this is coming from her.
That discrepancy is one of the things the surfer site records will resolve. But it's not the only one. For anyone hearing about Nolan Wells for the first time, here's what happened. It's not going to be a full, you know, 20-minute explanation. Here's the Cliff Notes, in case you're just joining this story. Nolan was 18 years old from Ocean Springs, Mississippi. He was a football player at Southwest Mississippi Community College. On July 4th, he traveled by boat to Horn Island, an uninhabited barrier island roughly eight miles off the Mississippi coast with a group of friends for a holiday party. A lot of people were out there, multiple boats. He was the only black member of his friend group. And at some point in that afternoon, the boat Nolan had arrived on started taking on water. Faulty bilge pump. His friends called the SeaTill, a private towing service for help. And according to those friends, Nolan chose to stay behind on the island. They said he was talking to a girl and told them he'd catch a ride back on another boat. They left. They had his phone with them. Why they had his phone with them? We don't know the answer to that other than Nolan had left it on the boat when he was on the island. Two days later, on July 6, a US park ranger found Nolan's body in the water off the island's northwest tip. The Jackson County Sheriff told Nolan's mother, less than an hour after the body was recovered. And here's where all the conspiracy begins again, because words have meaning. Sheriff and any other sheriff out there watching this, who speaks to the public, your words matter.