What the Nolan Wells grand jury found, what it didn’t find, and why both matter
By Michael Smith | Reflective MVS
For almost three months, Nolan Xavier Wells has existed in that uncomfortable place where facts run out and certainty somehow keeps going.
On Monday, September 21, we finally got something substantial.
A Jackson County, Mississippi, grand jury declined to indict anyone in connection with the 18-year-old’s death. The investigation was not some two-page police memo tossed into a filing cabinet. The grand jury heard from 43 witnesses, issued 132 subpoenas, and reviewed cellphone forensics, photographs, videos, GPS information, autopsy findings, and other physical and digital evidence.
Its conclusion was clear on one point:
Investigators found no evidence sufficient to charge anyone with a crime in Nolan’s death.
That matters.
Here is what also matters:
Nobody can definitively say how Nolan Wells died.
His official cause and manner of death remain undetermined.
Those two facts can occupy the same room. They have to.
Unfortunately, nuance has been having a rough year.
What We Know Now
Nolan Wells went to Horn Island with friends on July 4.
He never came home.
His body was discovered two days later near the northwestern end of the island.
Almost immediately, questions began piling up.
Why had the others left without him? Why was his phone still on the boat? Why would an 18-year-old choose to remain behind without it? What happened during the hours between the last confirmed sighting of Nolan and the discovery of his body?
Those were legitimate questions.
Some of the answers that followed were not.
As attention grew, so did allegations, edited photographs, internet theories, and accusations against people who had been with Nolan that day.
The grand-jury investigation knocked down several of those claims.
Investigators found no evidence Nolan was the only Black person on Horn Island. They found no evidence that he had been involved in a fight. Claims involving cocaine were not supported by the toxicology findings. Some photographs circulated online as though they depicted what happened on July 4 were actually taken at a gathering days earlier.
And the grand jury found no evidence that Nolan’s death was racially motivated.
Those findings deserve to be acknowledged plainly.
We cannot demand evidence from law enforcement and then throw it away when it interferes with the story we had already written in our heads.
That is not accountability.
That is confirmation bias with a Wi-Fi connection.
But “No Crime” Does Not Mean “We Know What Happened”
This is where the case refuses to give anybody the neat ending they want.
Both Mississippi’s medical examiner and the independent forensic pathologist hired by Nolan’s family ultimately left his cause and manner of death undetermined.
The condition and location of Nolan’s body were considered consistent with drowning.
Consistent with.
Not definitively established as.
That difference is doing a lot of work.
There were injuries to Nolan’s body, including blunt-force trauma to the back of his head and other bruising. Investigators did not determine those injuries were fatal, and evidence presented during the investigation offered possible explanations for at least some of them.
But Nolan’s family and its attorneys continue to ask a fair question:
If those injuries did not kill him, what exactly did?
And if drowning is the most plausible explanation, how did Nolan end up in the water?
Those questions are not accusations.
They are questions.
There is a strange habit in public discourse where asking a question gets treated as an allegation, while making an allegation gets treated as evidence.
Neither is true.
A grand jury answers a particular question: Is there enough evidence to support criminal charges?
In Nolan’s case, the answer was no.
That does not magically reconstruct his final hours.
Nolan’s Family Still Does Not Have Closure
Civil-rights attorney Ben Crump, the NAACP, and Nolan’s family have challenged the idea that the grand-jury decision closes the matter.
They want the complete investigative file released. They want the full state autopsy. They have renewed calls for an independent federal review.
That does not mean their theory of the case is automatically correct.
It means parents whose son left home alive and came back dead still want to understand every piece of what happened.
I have a hard time finding that unreasonable.
At the same time, authorities have their own legitimate concern.
People associated with Nolan’s trip were publicly accused of crimes that investigators now say the evidence does not support. Some received threats. Federal criminal cases have grown out of alleged threats against witnesses and public officials connected with the investigation.
People can be damaged by speculation too.
There is a lesson somewhere in there for all of us.
Probably several.
We Started Asking Bigger Questions Because Nolan Wasn’t the Only Case
When I first began working on this story, Nolan’s death stood mostly on its own.
Then other cases started appearing.
Black men and women were being reported dead by hanging in different parts of the country. Some were found hanging from trees. Some deaths were quickly described as suicides. Families in several cases pushed back. Social media began connecting dots long before anybody had established whether those dots belonged on the same page.
For Black Americans, there was no way to look at those images without seeing history standing behind them.
America did not invent racial terror in our imagination.
Black people were lynched in this country by the thousands. Hangings were used not merely to kill individuals but to terrorize entire communities. Law enforcement sometimes participated. Government officials sometimes looked away. Newspapers sometimes treated lynching as spectacle.
That history is real.
So is the trauma attached to the image of a Black body hanging from a tree.
But history is context.
It is not an autopsy.
And that distinction has become more important as these cases have developed.
Tasia Fortune Shows Why You Investigate Before You Decide
Tasia Fortune was 29 years old when she was found hanging from a tree behind an abandoned home in Jackson, Mississippi, on August 3.
At first, nobody outside the investigation could say with certainty what had happened.
Her mother insisted Tasia had not killed herself.
Then the evidence changed the story.
Mississippi’s state medical examiner ruled Fortune’s death a homicide. Jackson police arrested 51-year-old Jarques Ratliff and charged him with murder. Ratliff has pleaded not guilty. Police have said the investigation remains active and additional arrests may follow, but they have not publicly laid out the full forensic evidence linking Ratliff to the killing or explained the roles investigators believe others may have played.
Authorities have not announced evidence that Fortune’s killing was racially motivated. Her own mother has said she believes what happened to her daughter was personal.
That case should humble everybody.
People who were ready to immediately call it suicide were wrong to close the book.
People who were ready to declare it a racial lynching before the evidence arrived were running ahead of the facts too.
The correct response was painfully simple:
Investigate the death.
Then follow the evidence.
In Fortune’s case, the evidence eventually said homicide.
Sometimes the Evidence Says Something Else
Just days ago, another Black man was found hanging from a tree in Upper Marlboro, Maryland.
The image was disturbing enough to trigger immediate fear in the community.
This time, Maryland’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner determined that the man died by suicide by hanging and reported no other signs of trauma. Police said they found no evidence of foul play.
That finding deserves the same respect we give the homicide ruling in Tasia Fortune’s case.
We cannot say “trust the medical examiner” when the finding supports what we suspected and then suddenly become forensic specialists when it does not.
Evidence has to be allowed to disappoint us.
Otherwise, it is decoration.
And Some Cases Still Sit in the Middle
Demetrius Fleming’s death remains there.
Fleming, 38, was found dead in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, in August, connected to a ligature.
Rather than immediately declare the death either suicide or homicide, Police Chief Lawrence Wiggins called it an open, equivocal death investigation.
That was the right language.
Not because it sounded satisfying.
Because investigators did not yet know.
The latest credible reporting still leaves Fleming’s case awaiting final medical-examiner findings.
So it stays unresolved.
No need to fill the empty space ourselves.
Congress Has Asked for a Broader Review
The growing national concern has reached Washington.
Earlier this month, Rep. Ayanna Pressley and nearly 60 other members of Congress asked the Justice Department and FBI to examine hanging deaths involving Black Americans across the country.
The lawmakers requested reviews of state and local investigations, independent autopsies where families agree, examination of physical and testimonial evidence, and better federal data collection.
That congressional request should not be confused with a finding.
Congress has not established that these deaths are connected.
It has not established that they constitute a wave of modern lynchings.
It has asked federal authorities to determine whether there is anything broader to find.
There is a considerable difference between those sentences.
The Tree Still Isn’t Neutral
When I first wrote about these cases, I kept returning to the idea that the tree is not neutral.
I still believe that.
A tree does not become ordinary scenery simply because a police report uses the word suicide.
Not in America.
Not after our history.
But memory carries responsibility too.
We do not honor the victims of racial terror by becoming careless with evidence in their name.
Ida B. Wells did not fight lynching by making stories bigger than the facts.
She investigated.
She gathered names.
She examined accusations.
She exposed lies.
Her work was powerful because white America had built an entire mythology around lynching, and she brought receipts.
That tradition asks more of us than suspicion.
It asks for discipline.
Nolan Wells Deserves That Discipline
The grand jury found no evidence supporting criminal charges in Nolan Wells’ death.
That finding deserves weight.
Investigators found no evidence his death was racially motivated.
That deserves weight too.
His cause and manner of death remain undetermined.
That cannot be quietly edited out because it makes the ending messy.
Nolan’s family still does not know exactly what happened to their son.
That matters.
And people who were publicly accused without evidence should not have their lives rewritten because the truth turned out to be less dramatic than a social-media theory.
That matters too.
We keep trying to force these cases into two boxes.
Trust the system.
Or trust nothing.
Maybe adulthood requires something harder.
Question institutions without inventing evidence.
Respect forensic findings without pretending institutions are infallible.
Remember history without forcing every tragedy to reenact it.
Demand transparency without deciding guilt first and asking for proof later.
Tasia Fortune deserved investigators who kept looking until the evidence established homicide.
The man in Upper Marlboro deserves not to have an official suicide determination rewritten by strangers who never examined him.
Demetrius Fleming deserves to remain an unresolved case until there is evidence to resolve it.
And Nolan Wells deserves more than becoming ammunition for somebody else’s argument.
He deserves the truth.
The uncomfortable truth, at least for now, is that an extensive investigation found no evidence that someone killed him.
And an extensive investigation still could not tell his family exactly how he died.
There is no contradiction there.
Just an answer none of us particularly likes.
We still don’t know.
Sources & Further Reading
Associated Press — No charges in Nolan Wells’ death following grand jury review
Mississippi Today — Grand jury issues no indictments in death of Nolan Wells
Associated Press — Black hanging deaths and the history of lynching in America
Associated Press — Arrest in the death of Tasia Fortune
Associated Press — Jarques Ratliff pleads not guilty in Tasia Fortune case
NBC Washington — Medical examiner rules Upper Marlboro hanging a suicide
WRAL — Demetrius Fleming death investigation remains open
Office of Rep. Ayanna Pressley — Congressional request for federal investigation
Equal Justice Initiative — Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror
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