A federal grand jury has indicted an Illinois man accused of threatening a witness in the Nolan Wells case, and he is now being held without bond ahead of a court date in Gulfport this week. Edward James Porter, 32, of Berwyn, Illinois, faces one count of interstate transmission of a threatening communication, which is the federal charge for sending a threat across state lines by phone, text, or online.
Prosecutors say that on July 31 Porter called Bart Edmiston Jr., a 21-year-old friend and former high school teammate of Nolan Wells, and Edmiston’s father, and threatened to kill them. According to the complaint, Porter also called a second person in Mississippi and said he would cut them up and put their body in a suitcase. Russell Latino, the attorney representing the Edmiston family, told the Associated Press that one of the two men Porter targeted is a witness in the investigation into Nolan’s death.
Edmiston was not on the boat that took Nolan and his friends to Horn Island on the Fourth of July. According to the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources, he helped the group after their boat got stuck in the Mississippi Sound that night. His family has said publicly that he has never been identified as a suspect at any point, and they have already served a cease and desist notice on at least one social media user over claims made about him.
Porter was charged on July 31, and the grand jury returned the indictment last week. A federal judge in the Northern District of Illinois initially granted him bond, but a Mississippi federal judge blocked the release and ordered him held. He is scheduled to appear before a judge in Gulfport on September 4. If convicted, he faces up to five years in prison, a fine of up to $250,000, and up to three years of supervised release.
Porter is one of three people federally charged over threats connected to the Nolan Wells case. Joseph Alfredo Vasquez Dumarce of Sacramento was charged after prosecutors said he sent a Facebook message threatening a bomb to Jackson County Chancery Judge Ashlee Cole, whose stepson Warren Hudson was one of the friends on the July 4 trip. Michelle Francine Edwards of Cincinnati was charged after authorities said she made dozens of threatening calls to the George County Chancery Clerk’s Office and later made bomb threats involving the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office on July 23.
Federal prosecutors have said none of the three appear to have any connection to Nolan, his family, the boating group, or the investigation itself. They are people who followed the story online and, according to the government, decided to act on it. Nolan’s own family has also received threats and hate mail, and no one has been arrested in connection with those.
None of this touches the central question. Nobody has been charged in Nolan’s death. The 18-year-old from Ocean Springs went to Horn Island with friends on July 4, was reported missing that night, and his body was recovered on July 6. Authorities said early on that they believed he drowned and had no evidence of foul play, while his family and their attorney Ben Crump have pushed back on that account and on the shifting explanations for why he stayed behind on the island.
The state autopsy and toxicology report have been completed and sent to Jackson County District Attorney Angel Myers McIlrath, who is refusing to release them until the case goes before a grand jury. She has said that presenting unnatural deaths to a grand jury is standard practice in her county and that outside pressure will not change how she handles it. A grand jury is a panel of citizens that reviews evidence in private and decides whether charges should be brought. Convening one does not mean anyone is being accused. Family attorney Eric Hertz said in mid-August that he expected the case to reach a grand jury within about 30 days.
The independent autopsy the family commissioned came back undetermined. The Congressional Black Caucus has asked the Justice Department to review the case, and DOJ has confirmed it received the letter. Mississippi Public Safety Commissioner Sean Tindell has separately warned that a toxicology report circulating on social media is fraudulent.
What the indictment marks is a second track running alongside the death investigation, one built entirely out of what people online have done while waiting for answers. The family is still asking for the autopsy. The witnesses are getting death threats. Both things are happening at once.
