Mississippi's official autopsy of 18-year-old Nolan Wells is finished, but the results remain sealed from the public and even the teen's own family, leaving a grieving household and a watching nation no closer to understanding how a college athlete vanished from a barrier island and turned up dead.
The State Medical Examiner's office has completed its examination of Wells' body and forwarded the findings to the Jackson County Sheriff's Department, ABC News reported. But officials have not released the results publicly, and the Jackson County District Attorney's office says the full case, including the autopsy report, will go before a grand jury once investigators wrap up their work.
That means the central question in this case, what killed Nolan Xavier Wells after a Fourth of July boat trip to Horn Island, a barrier island roughly 10 miles off Mississippi's Gulf Coast, remains officially unanswered nearly a month after his body was recovered.
The state autopsy's completion follows a private examination commissioned by the Wells family, which also failed to pin down what happened. That independent autopsy, conducted by forensic pathologist Dr. Roger Mitchell and funded by former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, returned a cause and manner of death listed as "undetermined pending investigation," AP News reported.
Dr. Mitchell found no evidence of fractures or deep tissue injuries. But he did note a "red discoloration" in the soft tissue at the back of Wells' skull, a finding he called "inconclusive." He could not rule out that "non-accidental factors contributed to or caused the death."
The family's attorney acknowledged "multiple limitations in the report." One of those limitations drew pointed criticism: the independent pathologist did not receive Wells' lungs or throat when conducting the second autopsy, a fact that Fox News reported has raised additional scrutiny about the handling of evidence in the case.
Connecticut's chief medical examiner, James Gill, offered a blunt assessment of the private autopsy's "undetermined" label. As the New York Post reported, Gill said the designation can mislead when results are still incomplete:
"We only use undetermined when we got all the results back... but to say undetermined in a case that's pending, I mean, it can be a little misleading."
So the public now has two autopsies, one state, one private, and neither has produced a definitive cause of death. For the Wells family, the silence from the state examiner's office is especially difficult. They have not been given access to the official findings.
The facts of the case, as reported so far, are straightforward in outline and deeply unsettling in detail. Wells, an 18-year-old Black college football player, traveled by boat with friends to Horn Island on July 4 to celebrate the holiday. He did not come back with them.
Jackson County Sheriff John Ledbetter previously told reporters that Wells appeared to have stayed behind voluntarily. As Newsmax reported, Ledbetter said investigators were told Wells "chose to stay on the island with the assumption that he was going to ride back to the mainland with someone else." Wells' body was found on July 6.
His family has challenged that account. They say Wells was an elite athlete capable of swimming and have raised questions about a reported fight on the island that they say they have seen on video. The family retained prominent civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who announced the independent autopsy findings at the 117th NAACP National Convention in Chicago on July 22.
Crump said his team would not stop pressing for transparency:
"This is only another part of the puzzle, and even though it tells us significant information, we still have more questions than we have answers at this time."
ABC News previously obtained the full audio of a distress phone call placed to Sea Tow, a local towing company, during the return trip from Horn Island. On the recording, one of Wells' friends, whose name has not been made public, reported the boat was sinking and asked to "get this boat unsank and towed back." The caller also told the dispatcher that "nobody here is over the age of 21" and that everyone on board was unhurt.
Sea Tow ultimately said its services were not needed because the boat found other help. What that "other help" was, and whether it changed the timeline of Wells' disappearance, has not been explained publicly.
Crump told reporters his team has obtained the audio tapes and plans to retain consultants and audio experts to analyze them. Separately, enhanced audio from the emergency call has surfaced disturbing background phrases that have only deepened public concern about what happened aboard that boat.
Jackson County investigators are also analyzing the distress call recording to determine whether it contains further clues. A July 5 Mississippi Department of Marine Resources Marine Patrol email, obtained by Fox News, listed Wells' alcohol intake as "heavy", but did not identify who provided that information or when it was gathered.
The Jackson County District Attorney's office has said it will present the case to a grand jury once the sheriff's department finishes its investigation. Officials emphasized that convening a grand jury does not imply criminality, it is standard procedure for most unnatural or suspicious deaths in the county.
That framing may be legally accurate, but it does little to ease the pressure building around this case. A $125,000 reward, funded by Rev. Al Sharpton, actor Tyler Perry, and former NFL wide receiver Terrell Owens, is being offered for information leading to an arrest and conviction, Breitbart reported.
Sharpton has been direct about his frustration with how law enforcement initially characterized the case. "We can't have someone in law enforcement saying there was no foul play before there was an investigation," he said.
Meanwhile, the Wells family's legal team has sent a formal preservation letter to parties connected to the case, putting them on notice that litigation is anticipated. The letter demands the preservation of "all materials of all kinds" that may be relevant to claims or defenses, a clear signal that civil action may follow regardless of what the grand jury decides.
Other investigative threads remain active. A phone inspection agreement was recently reached, though the family has raised alarms about missing Snapchat data from devices connected to the case. And earlier accounts of how Wells' body was found have themselves been disputed, the United Cajun Navy corrected claims by Crump about the condition of Wells' clothing when his body was recovered.
Nearly a month after Nolan Wells' body was pulled from the waters off Mississippi's coast, his family has buried him, hired one of the most prominent civil rights attorneys in the country, commissioned their own autopsy, and publicly demanded answers at a national convention. They have done everything within their power to force accountability.
What they have not received is a single official finding explaining how their son died.
The state autopsy is done. The sheriff's investigators are still working. The grand jury has not been convened. And the results, the only document that might begin to answer the question that matters, sit in a file at the Jackson County Sheriff's Department, unavailable to the people who need them most.
When a teenager goes on a boat trip with friends and comes back in a body bag, the public deserves facts, and the family deserves them first.
