Civil rights attorney Ben Crump held a press conference in Orlando Thursday, unveiling new forensic evidence in the death of 18-year-old Nolan Xavier Wells — including cell phone GPS data, recovered Snapchat messages and details from a state medical examiner’s autopsy report.
Wells, a Black college freshman and football scholarship athlete, disappeared during a July 4 boating trip to Horn Island off the Mississippi Gulf Coast. His body was found two days later on the island’s northwestern tip.
A Jackson County grand jury recently declined to charge anyone in his death, finding the evidence consistent with drowning.
Crump’s team worked with Andrew Garrett of Orlando-based Garrett Discovery to extract data from Wells’ phone, producing more than 1 million artifacts of data. Garrett reconstructed a GPS-based timeline tracking the phone’s movements throughout July 4 — from a morning McDonald’s stop to Horn Island and back to a boat ramp that evening.

“We have every moment of Nolan’s phone from morning to night,” Garrett said.
Garrett said Wells’ phone recorded movement back on the mainland after the group left Horn Island — despite friends saying Wells chose to stay behind. He added that some of that phone activity occurred after Wells died, but before his parents retrieved the device.
[WATCH: Data from Nolan Wells cell phone GPS provided by Garrett Discovery of Orlando]
The team also manually recovered 282 pages of deleted Snapchat messages from Wells’ friend groups and provided them to the Jackson County district attorney. Garrett confirmed data was deleted from the phone after Wells last had it in his possession.
“In order for that to be done, somebody had to take a user action to delete data,” Garrett said.
“The messages from his phones in the Snaps (Snapchat conversations) will show that some of his own friends were concerned about people on Horn Island can be racist,” Attorney Ben Crump claimed. “That’s his friends discussing that on Snap.”
The state medical examiner’s autopsy found two roughly two-inch contusions on the back of Wells’ skull — and no water in his lungs, airways or stomach. Both the state medical examiner and independent forensic pathologist Dr. Roger Mitchell listed the cause of death as undetermined.
“We don’t know what happened to Nolan Wells,” Crump said. “If you know anything, come forward.”
Crump mentioned a news conference tentatively scheduled for next Thursday in Atlanta where Mitchell would present and explain both autopsy reports in detail.