F rom 1,500 feet in the air, Sean Burdette’s eyes scanned the calm Mississippi water in the early morning hours of July 6. The sky was a little hazy from the Saharan dust plume that had come in over the Atlantic Ocean and settled over the Gulf Coast. Burdette had taken his propeller plane up just after six in the morning, after briefing Gulfport air traffic control that he’d likely be flying lower than usual around Horn Island. This was not a recreational flight, like Burdette’s typically are. This was a search for a missing boy, 18-year-old Nolan Wells. The college football player had disappeared on July 4 after a boating trip with friends on the barrier island off the coast of Ocean Springs, Mississippi.
Burdette had helped search for a missing child in these waters once before, a seven-year-old who had drowned in a boating accident in 2024. This search was more personal. Wells had been to Burdette’s house; his teen son was in Wells’ circle of friends, but he had been out of town on the Fourth of July.
Sitting next to Burdette was Brian Trascher, vice president of the United Cajun Navy, a civilian search-and-rescue volunteer group based in Louisiana. Burdette and Trascher had just met before taking to the skies to look for Wells, who at that point had been missing for more than 36 hours. Volunteers from the Cajun Navy had charted a flight path based on where they thought a body could be found, given the temperature of the water and the currents.
Burdette says that at around 8:30, they noticed a few boats pulled into the northwest tip of Horn Island.
“Look over there,” Burdette said to Trascher, pointing to more boats moving to the same area. Burdette circled back around and dropped the plane to 650 feet above the land, and that’s when he and Trascher saw officials standing next to a body lying on the shore, face down in light blue swim trunks.
“It was a gut-wrenching moment,” Burdette tells me, his voice turning quiet.
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It’s a few days after Wells’ body was found, and Burdette is back in his plane, flying us over the water to show me the path he took in the search. In the five days since he went out to look for Wells, the teen’s disappearance and death have made national news, and there have been more questions than answers about Wells’ final day on Horn Island, about 10 miles offshore from coastal Mississippi, where Wells grew up.
After days of searching, Wells’ body was found on Monday, July 6, not far from where he had been last seen with friends during the Fourth of July celebrations.
That day, Wells was one of a few Black kids in a group of mostly white friends, and his death has spurred national conversations about interracial friendships, systemic racism in the South, and whether Black people are safe in majority-white spaces. But before the swirl of attention, there was a frantic search for a teen known in the community as an outgoing, charming athlete with infectiously positive energy who loved making people smile.
Sean Burdette, who offered his plane to help search for Nolan Wells, flies over Horn Island. Lorena O’Neil “Nolan was a friend you could always be around,” Kayla Conway tells me. “He was always open to meeting new people and making them feel accepted and loved. If you met Nolan, you would never forget him or his laugh.”
JUST AFTER 11 ON THE NIGHT of Saturday, July 4, Nolan Wells’ mother, Christine Wonsley, got a phone call.
Her son’s friend, Warren Hudson, asked if she’d heard from Wells. Hudson told her Wells had not returned with them from Horn Island because he’d wanted to stay behind with friends, but that nobody had seen him make it back to land.
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“I said, ‘Alright, well, don’t freak out, I’m going to call the Coast Guard,’” Hudson recounted, when describing their conversation to YouTuber Brandon Tatum.
Wonsley had last seen her son the night before, on July 3, after he’d cooked a salmon dinner for his parents and then headed to a friend’s house to sleep over before the group boating trip. “He was just like, ‘Hey, mom, I’m about to go, Iove you,’” Wonsley later said in a press conference. “It was a hug, kiss, and he left.”
“When I received the phone call from Warren, I immediately called my friend Toshima and I said, ‘Hey, have you guys seen Nolan?’” Wonsley told Good Morning America. Toshima’s sons, Jalen and Jayvon Williams, had grown up with her son. Jayvon and Jalen pulled up Nolan’s location on Snapchat while Wonsley tried to track his phone on the tracking app Life360. The apps located Wells’ phone in different places, with Snapchat showing it on the island and Life360 showing it back on the mainland.
Wonsley asked her friend to pick up the phone from a house near the location shown on Life360. Meanwhile, Wonsley’s husband, Elmore, went to the house where Wells had slept the night before to retrieve Wells’ keys. When Elmore arrived, he later said in a press conference, he was initially told the keys weren’t there. But they were eventually found on top of an Xbox in the house. The confusion around the keys and phone added to Wells’ parents’ concern. Wonsley said in the GMA interview that when she and her sister went through her son’s phone and saw there were no Snapchat pictures from the last 24 hours, she found it strange, since he always documented his day on social media.
Wonsley called the police station, then was directed to the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources (MDMR), since Horn Island, where her son was last seen, sat on federal land in the Mississippi Sound. She later said there was confusion over who would have jurisdiction over the search.
Wonsley posted on her Facebook at 11:55 p.m. Saturday night, “Please be on the lookout for Nolan … It’s unclear if he made it back on land. Please message me if you have seen him.”
Around midnight, Wells’ parents met a deputy from the Jackson County Sheriff’s office to share the bits of information they’d gotten from Wells’ friends.
“If I knew anyone who had a boat, I would have gone out that night,” Elmore later said in a press conference. “We tried, but I don’t have friends with boats.”
About two hours later, in the middle of the night, Lieutenant Patrick Carron from the MDMR spoke with the shift supervisor from the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office, Lieutenant Tracy Odom. Odom told Carron he and his deputies had taken the initial missing person’s report and had spoken with several friends who’d traveled to the island with Wells.
“Based on the information provided, Odom did not have reason to believe there were any water-related exigencies or emergencies,” reads an MDMR report. “And he believed the most likely scenario was Nolan rode in on another vessel but did not have his phone in his possession to make contact with family.”
BEFORE SUNRISE ON JULY 5, people across Ocean Springs were sharing Wonsley’s Facebook posts asking for any information about her missing son. Wells’ football coach saw one of those posts and contacted Wells’ parents that morning, offering to take them out on his boat. The Wonsleys and Wells’ coach went out to Horn Island early that morning, circling the island by boat and walking on shore trying to find the teenager. While there, they ran into officials on an MDMR patrol boat who were also searching the island for Wells.
Around the same time that morning, Kayla Conway woke up and saw the missing-person flyers on Facebook. She had known Wells for a couple of years, since they’d gone to neighboring high schools, but hadn’t been one of the dozens of teens from the area to head out to Horn Island for the Fourth of July. She opened Snapchat, checked Wells’ location, and saw he was at home. Relieved, she took a screenshot of his location to send to his mother.
She then sent Wells a Snapchat message saying, “Omg you scared me I thought you were missing.” Wonsley responded to the message, explaining that she had Wells’ phone.
Conway began frantically thinking of ways to help. She followed the United Cajun Navy on Facebook and messaged them to see if they could look for her missing friend. “Please help spread the word! We all miss him so much!” she messaged at 7:25 a.m. Volunteer Josh Gill responded with his phone number, and Conway sent it to Wonsley.
“Hi this is Christine,” Wonsley wrote to Gill just after 8 that morning. “My son is Nolan Wells who went missing yesterday.”
“Within 30 minutes, we had two boats and a drone with additional assets on the way,” Gill tells me.
We’re sitting in his backyard by the water in a town outside of New Orleans on Thursday, July 9. Above us hangs memorabilia Gill has kept from the different search-and-rescue operations from his year and a half volunteering with the United Cajun Navy. He’s traveled to Alaska and South America to help after natural disasters or to help find missing people. But this search was nearby — just 100 miles east of where he lives here in Louisiana; he’d been to Horn Island several times before. He tells me about how he and Wonsley spent that Sunday on the phone, texting and calling each other with any small bit of information they heard that might give a clue to her son’s whereabouts.
Gill sent a search-and-rescue operator and an off-duty police officer out to Horn Island with a drone to look for the teenager. He says when he contacted the Coast Guard, they told him the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office was taking the lead on the investigation. Several of Wells’ friends took boats out to look around the island and tell Rolling Stone they saw a helicopter, boats from the Biloxi Fire Department, and MDMR searching the area as well. MDMR officials tried to launch drones, according to their report, but the excessive heat caused issues with the batteries and they had to cancel the drone flights.
The United Cajun Navy’s Josh Gill headed up the organization’s search for Wells. Courtesy of Josh Gill A high school friend of Wells’, Tracestin Shepherd, had been out on Horn Island on the Fourth and says he and his friends had been holding out hope Wells had fallen asleep on someone’s couch and hadn’t woken up yet. The last time Shepherd had seen Wells was a little before 4 p.m., shortly before Shepherd left the island with his family after he was involved in an altercation near the beach. The morning of July 5, Shepherd says, he was on a boat with friends, searching the water between Ocean Springs and Horn Island. They ran into a retired police officer aiding in the search, who told him and his friends to go on social media and call everyone they knew to see if they could find Wells.
“I grew up on the water. I knew that if there was any way Nolan was on land, they would have found him,” Shepherd says. “If he was on the water, he had died.”
Sitting at his dining room table a week after Wells first went missing, Shepherd cries as he remembers the search. “I was hoping for something else, maybe a miracle — Nolan’s strong, he’s athletic.” He remembers saying to his girlfriend that maybe they would find Wells and he’d greet them jokingly with, “About fucking time y’all showed up.”
Throughout July 5, officials from the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office and MDMR were interviewing people who had been seen on Horn Island with Wells. At around 4:30 p.m., according to the report, an officer spoke with Jennifer Pyron, the mother of Wyatt Pyron, who had taken his boat out with Wells on the Fourth. Pyron gave the MDMR officer consent to view the GPS on that boat, and the officer noted where the boat had been docked on Horn Island in order to narrow the search area for Wells.
In the early evening on the 5th, the weather took a turn, and the remaining rescue boats and drones had to return back to land, halting the search. A team from MDMR conducting sonar surveys of the area also had to stop because of the adverse weather conditions. It had been 27 hours since anyone had reported seeing Wells. Gill started to worry that it had been too long since he’d been seen alive.
“We’d found nothing on Sunday, so at that point I built a heavy response for Monday morning,” says Gill, adding that he realized their mission was likely turning into a search for a body versus a rescue. He started scheduling boats to go out, and looking for a way to search the area by air.
When Burdette called the Cajun Navy to offer his plane — he’d been trying to offer it all day on Sunday but says he had trouble connecting with the right authorities— Gill asked his volunteers to plot out a search grid the pilot could use the next morning.
NEWS ABOUT WELLS’ DISAPPEARANCE continued to spread through the coastal Mississippi communities. That same Sunday, local Allytra Perryman received a text in one of her group chats that an Ocean Springs teenager was missing. Perryman didn’t know Wonsley and her family before that weekend, but the news hit her hard.
“I could feel it in the pit of my stomach immediately,” says Perryman, deputy director for the Mississippi State Conference of the NAACP. “Because that is every Black mom’s fear, that something happens to your baby and you don’t know what’s going on. It immediately triggers trauma. It was a prayer we all had, but in the pits of our stomach, the fear was that he was not OK.”
Perryman says that for Black mothers, especially in Mississippi, the disappearance and death of a young Black man evokes the memory of Emmett Till, a Black child who was abducted in 1955 and lynched by two white men in Mississippi. Till’s brutal murder helped mobilize the Civil Rights Movement.
“It takes us back almost immediately to a mistreatment of our babies,” Perryman says. “You don’t feel racial tension in Ocean Springs. You feel like everybody’s on equal footing and your kids play sports together. But because you’re in Mississippi, in the back of your mind you know that there are these race lines — that fairness and equity don’t follow Black children like they do white children.”
“You hope and pray that’s not the case — I don’t want that to be the case,” says Perryman. “A missing child is scary. A missing Black child with a boat full of white children and they come back and he doesn’t? Hits you in the face.”
ON THE MORNING OF MONDAY, JULY 6, Gill was driving up to the Lake Mars Pier, a public boat dock in Ocean Springs, where the search for Wells was being headquartered, when he received a phone call from law enforcement around 9 a.m. A national park ranger had found a body matching Wells’ description on the northwestern tip of Horn Island.
Gill reached the boat launch a few minutes before Wells’ parents arrived. He had never met Christine Wonsley in person, but at this point they’d spoken on the phone nonstop for two days. Gill, a tall man who stands out in a crowd with his long white beard, heard a horn honking as a car parked close to the pier.
“She gets out, runs straight to me, hyperventilating, and I give her the biggest hug,” says Gill. “I’m just holding on to her, and she collapses.”
Gill sat with Christine and Elmore on the grass as they waited to hear where the body was being transported.
Nearby, local newspaper reporter Anita Lee spoke with friends of Wells’, including Jayvon Williams and Trace Carter. “I was there to find out about Nolan and who he was,” Lee says. “I don’t like to have a story about a tragedy without letting people know who this person was.”
While I’m in Mississippi, several of Wells’ friends talk to me about Wells’ signature laugh, his energetic spark, upbeat attitude, and his love of cheering people up with dance moves.
“No matter what mood you were in, he could cheer you up,” Conway tells me of Wells. “He was the friend who never judged, the most understanding, heartfelt person you could talk to.”
Christine Wonsley cries next to her husband Elmore at the memorial service for their son. Gerald Herbert/AP Lee heard similar stories while speaking with Wells’ loved ones on the pier.
“It just broke my heart, because right away, I knew he was a really special, special young man,” says Lee. “He was a superb athlete, a leader, and a really good influence on his friends and siblings.”
On July 6, Gill remembers Wonsley gathering her composure, as more of her siblings and family members drove up to the pier. A police officer approached Christine and Elmore to tell them where to meet the coroner, who had done a preliminary assessment of the body before a full autopsy would be performed by a state medical examiner.
“I said, ‘Look, there’s going to be some tough conversations coming up. We don’t know if it’s your son,” Gill says. “I asked her, ‘Tell me what your mama instinct says.’”
“She said, ‘That’s my son.’”
IN THE WEEKS SINCE WELLS’ BODY was found, the case has catapulted onto the national stage. One of the final photos of Wells, pictured with four white friends, has gone viral, and many of the friends last seen with him have received death threats. Wells’ parents have also received threats, hate mail, and online harassment, and his mother, a nurse practitioner, has been bombarded with one-star reviews on her professional website.
At a press conference on July 22, Ben Crump, the civil rights attorney working with Wells’ family since his death, released preliminary results from an independent autopsy commissioned by the family saying the pathologist found the cause of death as “undetermined pending investigation.” The independent examiner said he didn’t have all of the information available to determine the cause of death. For example, he could not “directly observe the airway and lungs for water and the stomach for gastric contents,” because they had been previously dissected. Nor could he examine part of Wells’ throat, which the independent examiner wrote was likely kept for further testing by the Mississippi state medical examiner who had conducted the first autopsy on July 7.
Rolling Stone reached out to the sheriff’s office, the district attorney’s office, the Wonsley family, and Crump’s team, all of whom declined to comment for this story.
The Jackson County Sheriff’s Office and FBI are conducting a joint investigation, as are Crump and the Wonsleys. The official autopsy results and toxicology report have yet to be released. Angel Myers McIlrath, district attorney for Mississippi’s 19th Circuit Court District, announced she will be releasing limited information before presenting the case to a grand jury, which is standard in that county for all deaths not related to natural causes.
As people wait for investigation results, information has continued to come out about Wells’ final day. In audio released from a distress call made by Wells’ friends, the caller requests towing assistance after a boat malfunction. Muffled voices can be heard in the background. Some online commenters hear people saying Wells’ name and asking if he’s dead, while others insist the voices are too garbled and suggest the callers are just panicked about the boat taking on water.
The case has gotten a swell of attention online as internet sleuths try to figure out for themselves what really happened to Wells on the Fourth of July. Some of that attention has led to the spread of misinformation, including AI images and photos taken out of context.
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It could be weeks or months before Wells’ family gets answers.
“WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR SON NOLAN WELLS,” Christine Wonsley posted on her Facebook on Tuesday, July 28. “This is the ONLY question anyone should be focused on.”
