They tried to close the book on Nolan Wells, but the family and their legal team aren’t having it. Late Monday night, Jackson County District Attorney Angel Myers McIlrath dropped shocking news: a grand jury found no evidence of criminal conduct in the death of the 18-year-old Black teen who vanished after a Fourth of July boat trip to Horn Island off the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
As previously reported, Wells disappeared while celebrating the Fourth of July with friends on Horn Island, an island you can only reach by boat. His body was found at the northwestern tip of the island on July 6, two days after anybody laid eyes on him. From the jump, something felt off. Jackson County Sheriff’s Office officials said early on that investigators did not suspect foul play, which sparked serious concern about whether law enforcement was going to do this thing right in a state with a long, ugly history of racism and civil rights violations.
McIlrath kept promising the public a thorough, fair investigation. Now that it’s over, a lot of folks are asking: fair by whose standard? According to the DA, the grand jury met for four days, from September 14 to September 18, and ultimately determined Wells’ cause of death was “consistent with drowning,” based on where his body was located and findings from multiple autopsies. The panel reviewed testimony from more than 40 witnesses along with evidence ranging from GPS data to cellphone extractions to photos and video pulled from Horn Island, including material Crump’s own team turned over.
The panel’s report stated that if credible evidence comes to light suggesting Wells’ death was non-accidental, the matter should go back in front of the Jackson County Grand Jury for further consideration. That’s not exactly a clean, case-closed kind of statement.
McIlrath didn’t stop at reading the findings. In a 15-minute video posted to social media, she took a direct shot at Crump and his legal team, claiming they’d already told her office privately that they hadn’t found evidence a crime was committed. “I’m not suggesting that a grieving mother police the rumors surrounding her child’s death,” she said. “What I am suggesting is that the Crump team knew better but did not do better.”
She went further, flatly denying the racial angle that’s been swirling since day one: “There is absolutely no evidence to support the allegations that Nolan’s disappearance and death were racially motivated,” Myers McIlrath said, adding, “Nolan’s friends loved Nolan, and Nolan loved them. Nolan chose to stay on the island that day, and there is not a scintilla of evidence to contradict that.”
Crump wasn’t about to let that stand without pushback. In a statement released Monday night, the civil rights attorney made it clear the family isn’t buying the “case closed” narrative. “Today, the State of Mississippi is attempting to close the chapter on Nolan Wells’ death without getting to the truth,” Crump said, according to reports.
He followed up Tuesday with a statement that’s already circulating everywhere: “This grand jury result leaves us with more questions than answers. Nolan’s family will not rest until we know what happened to him, and neither will we.”
Now here’s where it gets complicated. The independent forensic pathologist the family hired, Dr. Roger Mitchell, didn’t hand them the slam-dunk they were hoping for either. Mitchell concluded, alongside the state medical examiner, that the cause and manner of death remains “undetermined” and that “drowning is a diagnosis of exclusion.” The independent autopsy also found that the position, condition, time of discovery, and location of Wells’ body was consistent with drowning.
So even the family’s own expert isn’t contradicting the official theory outright — he’s just not fully closing the door on it either. Crump has previously pushed back on that framing, claiming Mitchell didn’t have full access to Wells’ body during the independent exam.
Beyond the medical back-and-forth, there are still real, unanswered questions hanging over this case, the kind that keep a family up at night. Wells’ parents and their lawyers have voiced suspicion over why the friends who ferried him to the island left without him, with some saying he wanted to stay behind to talk to a girl. Wells’ phone reportedly stayed behind on the boat that carried him to the island in the first place. None of that, on its own, proves a crime. But it’s exactly the kind of loose thread that makes a family, and a community that’s seen this story before, refuse to just accept “undetermined” as a final answer.
Crump and Wells’ family aren’t stopping here. They’ve renewed their call for the U.S. Department of Justice to launch an independent investigation, and they’re demanding McIlrath release the full investigation file along with the complete autopsy report from the medical examiner. “We don’t know how Nolan died, and neither does the State of Mississippi. Mississippi must keep investigating, and if it will not pursue this to the end, the Department of Justice should,” Crump said.