On Wednesday, Donald Trump said he was considering asking the FBI to investigate the death of Nolan Wells, a Black college freshman who was last seen alive on a 4 July boating trip with friends.
Wells, 18, went missing while on Horn Island, a barrier island off the coast of Mississippi. His body was found on the island two days later. Wells’s cause and manner of death are still undetermined.
His disappearance and subsequent death have become a flashpoint for racial animosity in the country, drawing national scrutiny. During the Jackson county investigation into the case, social media became rife with misinformation about Wells, his family and his friends.
Wells’s mother, Christine Wells-Wonsley, started searching for him, leading to a photo of Wells with three white friends on a boat going viral.
In the months between Wells’s body being found and a Jackson county grand jury declining to indict anyone in his case, many have suggested that the treatment Wells’s family has received by local officials would have been different if they were white.
Wells’s family and Ben Crump, the civil rights lawyer who is representing the family, have called for a federal investigation into Wells’s disappearance and death, after a Jackson county grand jury’s decision to decline to indict anyone in the case.
The Jackson county grand jury determined that Wells drowned. However, an independent autopsy conducted by the president of the Howard University hospital, Roger A Mitchell Jr, a forensic pathologist, determined there was no evidence of drowning due to the absence of water in Wells’s stomach, lungs and throat. That autopsy also noted bruising on Well’s head, back, left shoulder and buttocks.
“We do not believe Nolan drowned, and the blunt force trauma to his head cannot be ignored or explained away,” Crump said in a statement. “Nolan’s family deserves the truth, and we will keep fighting until every question is answered and justice is served.”
On Tuesday, Crump and Wells’s parents joined Cynthia Choi, Stop AAPI Hate’s executive director, in calling for a federal investigation into Wells’s death and disappearance. The California congresswoman Maxine Waters, the Florida congresswoman Frederica Wilson and others also sent a letter to Jessica Bowron, the acting director of the US National Park Service (NPS), noting that most of Horn Island is federally designated land and calling on the NPS’s investigative services branch to open a “prompt and exhaustive investigation” into Wells’s disappearance and death.
“Today, I am asking the people whose job it is to serve and protect to keep their word to our family,” Elmore Wonsley, Wells’s father, said at the press conference. “Our son was found on federal land, and we are asking the FBI to step in and do a full investigation. We’re not asking for special treatment. We’re asking for what any father would do for his child, and that’s to find the truth about what happened to his child.”
As he was leaving the White House, reporters asked Trump whether he planned to push the FBI to launch an independent investigation into Wells’s death.
“Well, we’re looking at that,” he said. “Yes, we are.”
“Sunday will mark 100 days since we have been looking into the death of Nolan Wells, so when President Trump responds to news reporters that ‘we’re looking into it’, we believe that carries more weight than the response given by the FBI,” Crump said in a statement. “Our team stands ready to work with the federal government to ensure Nolan’s death is investigated to the fullest extent.”