Nolan Wells’ mother says she asked God for help getting answers about his death

NEW YORK — With the support of civil rights activist the Rev. Al Sharpton, her legal team led by attorney Ben Crump, and her husband, Christine Wonsley, the mother of Nolan Wells, revealed Friday that she prayed for help getting answers about the death of her 18-year-old son, and she believes God answered.

Speaking at a press conference at the new headquarters of Sharpton’s National Action Network in Harlem, the grieving mother said she decided to travel from Mississippi with her husband, Elmore Wonsley, because she believes it’s part of God’s plan to get her the transparency they are seeking about how and why their son died. 

Nolan Wells, a popular football player at Southwest Mississippi Community College, was found dead near Horn Island off the Mississippi Gulf Coast Monday after traveling there by boat with a group of friends to celebrate the July 4 holiday. Local investigators have suggested to the family that no foul play was involved, but the grieving parents aren’t convinced.

“We did this because what we are wanting is transparency. Although I do absolutely respect law enforcement, just the fact that [the] accidental drowning thing, it made both me and his father uncomfortable. Why are we so quick to rush to this?” she told reporters.

“The day they found him, we were at Port Mars, which is one of the boat launches, and I was standing beside the water, and I had said a prayer, and I was like, Lord, this isn’t what we wanted, but I just asked Him to help us get through this. Put the right people in our path that could potentially help us. Because at that point we hadn’t reached out to anybody. We didn’t know where to start,” she continued.

Christine Wonsley said with some help from a cousin and a friend, she got connected to Crump and concluded, “This has to be it.”

“This has to be God helping us along the way, and I’m not religious, but I am spiritual. And for that, I was grateful because I felt like things were being set up. And at this point, I’ve always said we are taking any help. … We don’t care, black, white, purple, … we just want to know what happened,” she said.

The Mississippi mother said her son has known the three friends he traveled with by boat to Horn Island since high school. She said the last time she saw her son was on July 3 and that he had spent the night at the house of one of the friends before the boat trip. She also stated that this wasn’t the first time her son had traveled with the friends to the island.

She said she began looking for her son after she received a call from one of his friends around 11:07 p.m. on July 4. After a series of jurisdictional questions emerged when she tried reporting her son missing, she and her husband eventually met with an officer from the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department and filed a report.

Her son’s phone was retrieved from the parent of one of her son’s friends, she said Friday, but it was unclear how that parent came to have the phone. The three friends her son traveled with to Horn Island have reportedly hired attorneys.

Elmore Wonsley said when he went to retrieve his son’s keys from the friend’s house where he stayed the night before heading out to Horn Island, the friend “just acted like he didn’t know where they were.”

“It was like he was clueless. He was like, ‘Ahhh, I don’t know,’” he said.

The grieving father explained how he pleaded with his son’s friend to go into a room at the house so he could access his son’s car, which was parked on the property, but he refused. He said he was very emotional at that point. He said he stepped away from the house, but about five minutes later the friend presented him with the keys to his son’s car.

He said after he got the keys, the friend and his family stayed inside the home until the police arrived.

Crump said the information about when Nolan Wells was last seen alive is also conflicting. The friends reportedly claim that they left Nolan Wells on Horn Island because he wanted to stay behind with a girl, but that girl claims he left her because he had to leave with his friends.

“The young woman says that he went and got back on the boat with the boys and the boys say, ‘No, he said he was gonna stay with her.’ And that’s a conflict. And the troubling thing is, if they’re saying he made the decision to stay behind, would an 18-year-old college student say ‘go ahead without me? I don’t want my cell phone or anything? It just doesn’t add up,” Crump said.

He added that Wells’ body has been transported to Washington, D.C., for an independent autopsy. When that process is complete, the findings will be made public.

Sharpton stated that as soon as the funeral arrangements for Wells are complete, they will also be shared with the public. For now, he said, many questions remain to be answered about the manner of Wells’ death.

“When we hear that this young man was engaged in some kind of [altercation], and his cell phone and keys ended up with one of the people that were there on the island and got away. He was one black with three young white men who happened to end up with his phone, happened to end up with his keys. There’s just too many questions that they should not be closing the investigation,” Sharpton argued.

“I’m from Brooklyn, so I’m a little different. I was built different. My nose is out here; my eyes are here. My brain is here, which means some things I can smell before I could see. … This does not smell right.”