The most powerful elected officials in
Mississippi have lined up behind
Jackson County Sheriff John Ledbetter in the
Nolan Wells case, and the speed of it tells you how high the stakes have gotten.
NAACP President Derrick Johnson made the accusation
Wednesday morning at the organization’s national convention in
Chicago, standing alongside attorney
Ben Crump and Wells’ parents. By that afternoon, a sitting congressman and a state senator had both gone on record defending the sheriff running the investigation.
Johnson was specific about who he was and was not accusing. He said the NAACP is not accusing any individual of anything, and that its accusation is directed at the state of Mississippi and local officials for being derelict in their duties. His stated concern was follow up, that regardless of what actually happened to Wells, the investigation should be thorough enough for the family and the community to trust that anyone involved would be held accountable.
Republican Congressman Mike Ezell, who represents the district and is himself a former sheriff and police officer, told Fox News Digital he has full confidence in Ledbetter and the local law enforcement officials working the case, and said he knows firsthand the demands and pressure of the job. Mississippi state Senator Jeremy England called the accusations against local investigators completely unfair, defended the reputations of the sheriff and district attorney as people of the utmost integrity, and said Mississippi investigators will not be swayed by public pressure. England also offered a line that captures the entire divide in the Nolan Wells case, which is that there is not always someone to blame.
Governor Tate Reeves got there first. Speaking publicly about the case for the first time on July 16, Reeves said he personally knows Ledbetter very well and has full confidence he will do his job. He also said he does not know all the details or facts of the case but has yet to see a fact or piece of evidence suggesting foul play, adding that if there was, the sheriff’s office, the district attorney’s office, and the Department of Public Safety would find it and act.
That is a governor, a congressman, and a state senator publicly backing the same sheriff in a death investigation where no cause of death has been established by anyone. The state autopsy has not been released and is awaiting toxicology. The independent autopsy the family commissioned came back undetermined, and the pathologist who performed it,
Dr. Roger Mitchell, wrote that he could not rule out that non-accidental factors contributed to or caused the death.
The friction in the Nolan Wells case did not begin Wednesday. It began with Ledbetter’s early statement that no foul play was suspected, which came before any autopsy was completed. Crump has argued that statement was premature. Al Sharpton put it more bluntly at the convention, saying the reason the nation is watching this situation is Mississippi’s history, and that law enforcement cannot say there was no foul play before there was an investigation.
Ledbetter’s own account has stayed consistent. He has said initial interviews indicated Wells chose to stay on Horn Island on July 4 and that his friends believed he would catch a ride back with someone else, and that those friends have cooperated. He has said his office interviewed the three friends who were on the boat and has spoken with more than 60 witnesses. He has repeatedly asked the public to send in photos, video, sightings, and any account of arguments or disturbances on the island that day, and asked people to stop spreading unverified information. He did not respond to press requests for comment on the NAACP’s criticism.
The sheriff has also confirmed the FBI is assisting, helping examine digital evidence collected in the investigation. Ledbetter has framed that as routine, because Horn Island sits within
Gulf Islands National Seashore and is federally managed, and his office regularly works with the FBI on cases involving federal land. The FBI separately confirmed it is addressing interstate threats that people connected to the case have received.
Jackson County Chancery Judge Ashlee Cole, the stepmother of one of the teens who made the trip, has spoken about death threats against her family, and Tracestin Shepherd, another of the friends who was there, told ABC News that he and others on the island have been threatened as well.
Where the family’s frustration lives is not in the existence of an investigation but in the silence around it. Wells’ mother, Christine Wonsley, said the district attorney’s office took over communication with the family because it has a victim advocate, and that the last time she heard from the sheriff’s department was a text message she initiated herself asking for an update. At Wednesday’s news conference she called the lack of information coming out of the police investigation concerning. Crump has said the family is trying to be respectful and collaborative, while calling it troubling that these investigations take as long as they do.
Both things are true at once, and that is the hardest part of the Nolan Wells case to hold. The investigation is real, and so is the family’s experience of being kept outside of it. When Jackson County District Attorney Angel Myers McIlrath told the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources this week that its records are exempt from release because the case is headed to a grand jury, she was following ordinary procedure. Grand jury referral is standard in Jackson County for unnatural or suspicious deaths, and reporting on that referral goes back to mid July. But every closed door in a case this raw reads as something more than paperwork to the people waiting on the other side of it, especially in a state whose history the family has cited directly as the reason they hired their own pathologist rather than rely on local authorities.
Nobody who has spoken publicly has offered an alternative explanation for what happened to the 18-year-old on that island. What Mississippi’s leadership has offered instead is character testimony for the man in charge of finding out.
