ISHWORLD

July 24, 2026

820 words

When friends gather for a Mississippi Gulf shores holiday and the death of the black “friend” cannot be explained away  

By Ishmael-Lateef Ahmad

Columnist At Large

The strange circumstances surrounding the death of 18-year-old Nolan Wells continues to bewilder the nation.

After two autopsies, the eventual return of his cell phone, curious behavior by his friends and companions, a statement by a female acquaintance, tell tale cellphone GPS tracking data, eyebrow raising law enforcement statements and a list of other unexplainable information about Wells’ death, the mystery remains about who, what, why and how could be involved, and why.

Official statements can’t come close to removing all doubt that Wells chose to remain on the remote offshore Horn Island, Mississippi without a boat and his cell phone, as if waiting for an unknown ride home.

Meanwhile, his “friends” reportedly left him on the island and rode their boat back to the mainland, loaded it on a trailer and drove some 70 miles or so home, as if nothing happened.

Also, authorities appear to explain no connection between his body – found two days later on July 6th in the ocean by the island – and his three friends returning to their homes without him, as if all was normal.

The case has attracted national attention. Civil rights lawyer Ben Crump and civil rights activist the Rev. Al Sharpton are on board to assist and support Wells’ parents, Christine and Elmore Wonsley. His funeral was held Monday, July 20th, in Ocean Springs, Miss., with reportedly hundreds in attendance. Sharpton and movie producer Tyler Perry each offered $50,000 toward information leading to an arrest and conviction in the case.  

Even so, authorities cannot fully explain away any of the unusual circumstances surrounding Wells’ isolation and subsequent death this recent July 4th weekend in the state of Mississippi, a state with a sordid anti-black racial history.

For some, the sequence of vacationing friends, music, partying and subsequent death of a friend all appear to be normal and explainable. Until you consider Wells is black, his three friends and the girl who talked with him that fateful day are white, and that Mississippi is the same state that gave us Emmett Till.

In 1955, Till – a 14-year-old black youth from Chicago – was kidnapped from his uncle’s Mississippi home, beaten, shot dead in the head, tied to a large metal fan with barbed wire and sent to the bottom of the Tallahatchie River for allegedly flirting with a white woman in a Money, Mississippi store. Till’s mother ordered an open casket funeral to display to the world the brutality of his death, a decision that would make Emmett Till’s death a rallying point for the fight for civil and human rights by African Americans.

As a youth, I heard about Emmett Till. While I was born in Mississippi, I was raised “up south” in St. Louis, Mo. My parents were raised in Mississippi, but after serving in World War II, my father came home from the war and, along with my mother, decided to move out of the Deep South, which they did in the early 1950s. Even so, we would visit Mississippi relatives often and it was among the best times of my childhood.

As I grew older and became adventurous, my mother, keenly aware of the danger of being black in the Deep South, would warn me to avoid going to stores with my Southern cousins and to be guarded in my behavior. It was easy for me because my parents raised me to be respectful to all people.

Later, as a newspaper reporter in Alabama during the 1980s and 90s, I lived in the Deep South during a time of renewal, a time framed as the New South. It was an amazing time for a black journalist and I grew to love the Deep South, again.

Even so, all was not perfect. There was the occasional race hate crime and dubious police behavior. Once, I even interviewed a leader of the Ku Klux Klan, a notorious white supremacist group, when people gathered in Montgomery, Ala. to witness or even stop a black elected official who said he was going to climb to the top of the state capital building to remove the Confederate flag flying atop the dome.

And so, it appears the Nolan Wells story is destined to join the long list of racially motivated incidents in the Deep South, reminding me that the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Finally, in the Wells case, the results of a second autopsy have been announced. Suspiciously, the report shows that Wells’ throat is missing and there is a neck wound above his back. Neither, the family’s legal team said, are consistent with a drowning.

Could the neck wounds be consistent with a hanging?

I wonder...

(ISHWORLD: The International Search for Humanity is a complimentary column created and distributed to media by freelance journalist Ishmael-Lateef Ahmad. Based in St. Louis, Mo., he can be reached via ishworldcolumn@gmail.com or his website at https://payhip.com/ISHWORLDcolumns).

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