Newz(AP) — Civil rights attorney Ben Crump released information from a forensic examination of Nolan Wells’ cellphone as well as details of the official autopsy Thursday, just days after a Mississippi grand jury declined to recommend anyone be charged in the teen's death.Attorneys representing the 18-year-old Black college student's family have called for transparency, asking that the grand jury investigative materials and the official autopsy report be publicly released. Crump and his team discussed the contents of the cellphone analysis, even reading a few Snapchat messages out loud, but they did not release a full report of all the messages sent and received in the days before Wells' death. It was announced late Monday that a grand jury did not find evidence of criminal conduct.The grand jury had been given access to that information, including 282 pages of Snapchat conversations, when it convened last week, according to the panel's report and Crump's release Thursday.
Crump said the forensic examiner was able to track messages received and sent and tie them to the location of Wells' phone from the day before he went missing all the way up to when his family regained possession of his phone.“The messaging, as I said, was very telling … some of his own friends were concerned about (how) people on Horn Island can be racist,” Crump said Thursday.Wells' family and their legal team have slammed the grand jury report and have been working to keep the investigation open and active. They've asked for federal authorities to look into the events around Wells' death. His body was found two days after he went with a group of mostly white friends on a boat trip to a barrier island for a July 4 party.The high-profile death in a Deep South state with a history of racial tension has sparked rampant speculation and suspicion.
State and local officials and several of Wells' white friends who had become the target of that speculation had hoped that the grand jury report would quell critics.Wells' parents and lawyers express suspicionsWells’ parents and their lawyers voiced suspicions after Wells’ friends left the island without him, saying he wanted to stay behind and talk to a girl. Wells’ phone was on the boat that took him to the island, and his family and their attorneys have expressed doubt that he would choose to stay behind without his phone.Crump said th… (AP) — Civil rights attorney Ben Crump has scheduled the release of a forensic examination of Nolan Wells’ cellphone just days after a Mississippi grand jury declined to recommend anyone be charged in the teen’s death.
Attorneys representing the 18-year-old Black college student’s family have called for transparency, asking that the grand jury investigative materials and the official autopsy report be publicly released. Crump released the final independent autopsy report Tuesday on behalf of the family and scheduled a livestreamed release of the cellphone report Thursday. The grand jury had been given access to that information when it convened last week, according to its report.
But details of those findings have not been made public. Wells’ family and their legal team have slammed the grand jury report and have been working to keep the investigation open and active. The high-profile death in a Deep South state with a history of racial tension has sparked rampant speculation and suspicion.
While state and local officials and several of Wells’ white friends who had become the target of that speculation hoped that the grand jury report would quell critics, there was little sign that the suspicion was subsiding in the immediate days after the report’s release. Lingering family suspicions Wells’ parents and their lawyers voiced suspicions after Wells’ friends left the island without him, saying he wanted to stay behind and talk to a girl. They also raised concerns about the phone possibly being tampered with given that there were no recordings or messages in the hours before he was last seen on social media apps his family said he avidly used.
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