A Mississippi grand jury has declined to bring criminal charges against anyone in connection with the death of Nolan Wells, an 18-year-old who disappeared during a Fourth of July boat trip to Horn Island and was found dead two days later.
Jackson County District Attorney Angel Myers McIlrath announced the grand jury's decision late Monday, September 21, releasing a report from the 23-member panel that met over four days, September 14 through 18. The jury heard testimony from 43 witnesses and reviewed physical and digital evidence, including GPS data, cellphone extractions, police reports, photographs, video, and more than 130 subpoenaed records, according to the report.
The panel returned what is known in Mississippi as a "no true bill," meaning it found insufficient evidence to support criminal charges against any individual. The report states that the grand jury found no credible evidence to support public allegations that anyone who traveled to or from Horn Island on July 4 aboard the three boats named in the report — identified as the Triton, the Palm Beach, and the Tideline — engaged in criminal conduct connected to Wells' death.
What happened on Horn Island
Wells, a wide receiver at Southwest Mississippi Community College and a graduate of Ocean Springs High School, traveled by boat to Horn Island on July 4 with a group of friends to attend a holiday gathering that drew roughly 300 people to the remote barrier island, which sits several miles off the Mississippi Gulf Coast and is accessible only by boat. According to accounts from friends who were with him that day, Wells chose to stay behind on the island when others began heading back to the mainland, telling them he planned to stay and talk with a girl he knew, and that he would find his own way back later.
Wells was last seen around 3 p.m. that day. When he failed to return, a search effort involving multiple law enforcement agencies and volunteer organizations began the following morning, July 5. The grand jury's report describes a thorough search of the island conducted ahead of the discovery of Wells' body. His body was recovered from the shoreline on the morning of July 6, and it was formally identified using dental records the following day.
Cause of death remains officially undetermined
Despite widespread public reporting that the grand jury "ruled" Wells' death a drowning, the report's own language is more limited. Both Mississippi's state chief medical examiner and Dr. Roger Mitchell, a forensic pathologist retained independently by the Wells family, concluded that the official cause and manner of death is undetermined. The grand jury report treats drowning as a diagnosis reached by process of elimination, meaning that, in the absence of evidence pointing to another cause, investigators consider it the most likely explanation based on where and how Wells' body was found.
The report also addressed bruising found on Wells' body, including a mark on the back of his head, concluding that none of the injuries documented were fatal. Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who represents the Wells family, has pointed to that same bruising as one of several details he says remain unresolved. Crump's team released its own independent autopsy report Monday night, which recommends keeping the investigation open given what it describes as continuing uncertainty about the circumstances of Wells' death.
Family and civil rights leaders push back
The decision not to indict drew an immediate response from Wells' family and their legal team. In a statement posted hours after the report's release, Crump wrote that a decision not to indict "does not resolve how Nolan Wells died." The Rev. Al Sharpton, who delivered a eulogy at Wells' funeral, issued a written statement arguing that the absence of charges should not be mistaken for an explanation. "We will not confuse the absence of an indictment with the presence of an answer," Sharpton wrote.
McIlrath, the district attorney, addressed the family's continuing questions directly in a recorded statement released alongside the report. She said the evidence uniformly supports the account that Wells chose to remain on the island that day of his own accord, and that nothing in the investigation contradicts it.
The grand jury addressed race directly
Wells' death drew national attention in part because of public speculation, much of it spread on social media, suggesting his death may have been racially motivated. The grand jury's report directly rejected that theory, and prosecutors emphasized the point in their public remarks. McIlrath said in her statement that there was "no evidence to support the allegations that Nolan's disappearance and death were racially motivated."
The report also disputed a separate piece of widely circulated online speculation: the claim that Wells was the only Black person present on the island that day. The grand jury found that assertion false, concluding it had fueled misidentification and rumor. The panel wrote that broader allegations circulated online against the occupants of the three boats named in its report are "not based in truth, and are solely the result of public clamor and private malice."
Wells' family and their attorneys have continued to raise the question of race in the context of the broader investigation, even as they have not pointed to specific evidence disputing the grand jury's finding on that point directly.
Disputes over the independent autopsy
The report also took up a claim Crump had made publicly in the weeks after Wells' death: that Dr. Mitchell, the family's independent forensic pathologist, was denied full access to Wells' body during his autopsy. The grand jury's report disputes that account, stating that Mitchell was given full access to the body with one exception — internal neck structures that remained in the custody of the state medical examiner's office.
What comes next
Because Mississippi has no statute of limitations on homicide, the case is not permanently closed. The grand jury's report notes explicitly that if credible new evidence emerges pointing to criminal conduct, the case can be reopened and presented to a future grand jury. For now, however, no charges are pending against anyone in connection with Wells' death, and the Jackson County District Attorney's office has not indicated any active plans to reconvene a panel absent new evidence.
The case had drawn sustained national coverage over the nearly three months between Wells' disappearance and the grand jury's decision, fueled in part by conflicting witness accounts, a widely circulated video from the day of his disappearance, and competing autopsy findings between state and independent examiners. A friend of Wells who was on the island that day, Tracestin Shepherd, told reporters in July that a viral video some interpreted as showing an altercation involving Wells actually did not depict him at all, saying the voice heard in the recording was his own, from an unrelated dispute with another person on the island. Crump has said Wells does appear elsewhere in that same video, heard asking for his phone back.
The grand jury's report does not resolve every question raised during the monthslong investigation, and it explicitly acknowledges that the official cause of Wells' death remains undetermined even as it found no evidence of a crime. For Wells' family and their representatives, that distinction is central to why they say their own inquiry into his death is not over, even though the criminal one, absent new evidence, effectively is.
