While the details surrounding Nolan Wells’ final moments remain a mystery, his mother maintains that the 18-year-old student-athlete wasn’t “sloppy drunk” during that Fourth of July gathering on Horn Island. She points to a witness who crossed paths with him that afternoon, noting that the individual described Wells as “perfectly fine” during their exchange.
From the jump, Christine Wonsley has been clear that the rampant speculation regarding her son’s sobriety has been “gut-wrenching” to process.
“If you were in our situation, how would you feel if there were millions of people who were saying, ‘Oh, hey, well, he was at an island. He was heavily drunk,’ ” Christine asked Don Lemon on the July 31 episode of The Don Lemon Show.
“And I’m like, ‘But was he though? Or is this a narrative that you guys want to use,’ ” she continued during the interview.
Wonsley shared that one of Wells’ football coaches reached out to confirm he had seen him on July 4, roughly between 2:45 p.m. and 3:30 p.m.
“He was like, ‘Christine, yeah, we talked for a while. We talked about college. We talked about his life, his plans,’ ” Christine recalled the coach telling her. “And he was like, ‘He was perfectly fine.’ Because I think it had bothered him too that there was this narrative of, oh, he was sloppy drunk.”
It’s been nearly a month since Wells headed to that massive Horn Island celebration. He arrived with his crew but ended up separated from them, vanishing in broad daylight before being found dead two days later.
According to preliminary reports from the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources, ABC News noted that witnesses claimed Wells had been drinking heavily with friends prior to his disappearance.