As renowned civil rights attorney Ben Crump read aloud preliminary findings of an independent autopsy report for 18-year-old Nolan Xavier Wells, the Mississippi college student-athlete found dead two days after a July 4 boat outing with friends, his mother revealed a visceral reaction.
RACE: Black
DATE OF DEATH: Unknown
Christine Wells-Wonsley shook quietly. Her husband, Elmore Wonsley, wrapped his arm around her. When it was time to reveal the autopsy findings Wednesday morning, both were encouraged to exit the stage of the 117th NAACP National Convention in Chicago to sit in the front row at the press conference. Then attorney Crump took the podium:
“This forensic pathologist identified several limitations during the second autopsy that creates barriers to establishing a definitive cause and manner of death,” Crump read from a document titled Preliminary Report: Death of Nolan Xavier Wells.
Wells-Wonsley closed her eyes, seemingly in an attempt to harness her emotions in front of the dozens of people listening in the room, and possibly millions of people watching online. Crump and Nolan’s family traveled to Chicago for the final day of the NAACP’s annual meeting to announce findings of their own autopsy paid for by Colin Kaepernick, a former star NFL quarterback and Black activist. The official autopsy, conducted by the Mississippi State Medical Examiner’s Office, is being withheld until reviewed by a grand jury, Jackson County District Attorney Angel Myers McIlrath said Thursday. Photographers, videographers, journalists and content creators constantly pivoted their gaze between Wells-Wonsley and Crump as he unveiled each horrific detail from the stage.
“The body was so decomposed that you couldn’t tell if there was bruises or impressions on the body when he received it on the 10th of July,” Crump read.
Nolan’s mom shook her head in disbelief. At times, she looked up toward the sky, perhaps to stop tears from flowing down. But the intensity of a mother’s love, courageously litigating for compassion and justice surrounding the murky death of her eldest child, is understandably a hard thing to contain.
“However, dissection of the back of the head during the layered posterior neck dissection revealed a 12 x 8-inch focal area of red discoloration in the deep soft tissues overlaying the occipital bone,” Crump continued.
Shrieks filled the conference room. Wells-Wonsley’s whole body shook again.
As Crump proceeded to read that some structures of Nolan’s neck — his tracheal and laryngeal cartilages, thyroid horn and hyoid bone — were not sent along with his body to Dr. Roger A. Mitchell, a Washington, D.C.-based board-certified forensic pathologist, more audible yet familiar gasps of disbelief and despair filled the room.
Black America has been here time and time again. The community’s conventional wisdom asks: What is the State of Mississippi keeping from us? Crump later acknowledged Mitchell’s notation that organ retention during an initial autopsy is common forensic pathology practice. However, since those structures weren’t included, he couldn’t review them and thus could not rule out injury to Nolan’s neck as a contributor to or cause of his death.
“That’s some bullcrap,” a Black woman in the press area said.
“That’s cruel,” another Black woman uttered from further back in the room.
Nolan’s Black body has become a spectacle, in the way every parent, grandparent, auntie, uncle and sibling has feared since the trans-Atlantic slave trade during the 16th to 19th centuries, and since the world bore witness to the mutilated body of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955. His dad spoke with pride about how Nolan should be at football practice right now. He was a wide receiver at Southwest Mississippi Community College, about 166 miles north of his Ocean Springs hometown on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The first day of in-person classes is Aug. 17. Nolan was supposed to turn 19 two days later on the 19th.
“‘Dad, I made this play, or I made that play,’” his father said, recalling the kinds of text messages he would be getting from his son right now about football practice. “We’re gonna miss our son. And, like my wife said, we just want to know what happened to our son because the things that you’re telling us is not the character of our son. We know our son.”
Myriad competing narratives, conspiracy theories and misinformation have swirled across news headlines and social media posts since Nolan went missing on July 4. That day, Nolan traveled with friends on a private boat to Horn Island, a sandy barrier island and summertime favorite. Crump said there were hundreds of beachgoers there that day.
Nolan didn’t make it home that evening, though. And Wells-Wonsley reported him missing.
On July 5, she also began posting on social media about the disappearance of her son. A U.S. park ranger found his body on the island’s shore on July 6. That day, Jackson County Sheriff John Ledbetter told media outlets, “No foul play has been identified.”
Warren Hudson, one of the three white teens Nolan is photographed with while traveling to the island, and his stepmom, Jackson County Circuit Court Judge Ashlee Cole, maintain that Nolan stayed behind on the island to talk to a girl — although his cellphone was on the boat the other teens returned to shore on. Warren broke his silence on the conservative podcast “The Officer Tatum” hosted by Brandon Tatum, a former Tucson, Arizona, police officer. The podcast aired on July 21, a day after Nolan’s funeral services.
During the press conference, The TRiiBE asked Wells-Wonsley to share the timeline of contact she’s had with local authorities. She said the last time she spoke with the Jackson County sheriff’s department was “I think, a day or two after his body was found.”
“That was only initiated by me,” she said. “I sent him [the sheriff] a text message. I was like, ‘Hey, this is Christine, Nolan’s mom. I just want to see if there are any updates.’ Basically, he called back. There were no updates.”
The sheriff’s comments on the first day were why Wells-Wonsley grew more concerned:
“It was not even an hour that his body had been removed and the sheriff came out and said, ‘This is, you know, accidental drowning. We don’t think there’s foul play,” she recalled. “Again, that is why we’re doing what we’re doing and why we’re moving the way we are because I sat there and asked them to take this case as if this is your child, your family member, your whatever, and they promised that they would.
“But when you make statements like that straight out the gate, that’s an issue,” she said.
The circumstances surrounding Nolan’s death and subsequent investigation reminds many of a mother’s crusade for justice for 14-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till, who was abducted and brutally murdered in Money, Mississippi, in 1955. Mamie Till-Mobley, in her fight to expose the barbarism and racism of his murderers and the American justice system, held an open-coffin funeral for Emmett, and published pictures of his mutilated body in Black magazines. He could have turned 85 on this July 25 had he been granted the freedom to live.
Although the cause and manner of death of Nolan remains unknown, pending an ongoing investigation, Reena Evers-Everette, the daughter of assassinated civil rights leader Medgar Evers, said there is a throughline and connection because of the history of violent racialized hatred and systemic coverups in this country.
“It’s important to acknowledge those who have unexpected deaths that might possibly be violent, might possibly be race-oriented, and to be here when the family’s here,” Evers-Everette told The TRiiBE. “It’s important for all of us to uplift each other, support each other and ask our Creator for safety, peace and protection, and clarity because in order to do what’s right and what we think is just, we need to have all of the facts.”
Evers, the NAACP’s first field secretary in Mississippi, was fatally shot after getting out of the car in the driveway of his home in 1963. It took 31 years to convict his murderer, white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith, who was tried twice in 1964, but all-white juries deadlocked each time.
“I don’t want any family to go through that ever,” Evers-Everette said.
Nolan’s family is calling for a fair, impartial and comprehensive investigation into his death.
“At the end of the day, like I said before, any parent that would be in this situation, you would do anything, anything to find out what happened to your child,” Wells-Wonsley said, “and that is what we’re here to do.”
The Rev. Wendell Anthony, president of the NAACP Detroit branch, closed out the press conference in prayer, asking everyone in attendance to lock arms.
“We have been dying since 1619, still seeking justice,” Anthony began. “Pray with me.”
“We’re here for transparency. We’re here for truth. You are the way, the truth and the life. We’re here because of You, Lord God. How long must we continue to pay evil a toll at the gateway towards justice? How long must we see our children lie bleeding in the streets, in the sand, in the water, on the asphalt pavements of this nation that we built? Even on July the Fourth, a day that serves a lesson in mockery and …where we talk about independence, yet we are not independent from those who seek justice. Help us, Lord. Bless us right now. Bless this family. Cover this mother, whose tears fall down her cheeks. Cover this father, as he remembers his son.”
Morgan Elise Johnson contributed to this story.
