Nolan Wells’ friends say the death threats aimed at them since his death have now reached their families. Warren Hudson, Jax Pitalo and Morgan Seymour, three of the young men who were with Wells on the July 4 trip to Horn Island off the Mississippi coast, sat down with Fox News host Kayleigh McEnany for an interview airing on her Saturday morning show, Saturday in America.
Hudson told McEnany he has received “thousands” of threats and that the harassment no longer stops with him. “It’s OK to talk about me, but they’ve dragged my family into this,” he said. “They’ve dragged my closest friends into this, and they’ve dragged amazing people all across the board into this that do not deserve this at all.”
Pitalo said he has received “plenty” of death threats, including bomb threats sent through the mail. Seymour said he is facing threats as well.
Wells, 18, was a student athlete from Ocean Springs, Mississippi. He went to Horn Island with friends on the Fourth of July for a party that lasted all day, then disappeared. His body was found on the island on July 6. In the weeks that followed, Nolan Wells’ death became a national story, and the friends who were with him that day became the targets of online theories accusing them of playing a role.
In September, a Jackson County grand jury unanimously declined to indict anyone. A grand jury is a panel of citizens that reviews evidence and decides whether criminal charges should be filed. Its report said it found no credible evidence of criminal conduct and described the evidence as consistent with drowning. The Wells family, represented by civil rights attorney Ben Crump, has not accepted that as an answer. “No True Bill Does Not Resolve How Nolan Wells Died,” Crump wrote on Facebook after the report came out. A “no true bill” is the legal term for a grand jury’s decision not to charge anyone.
The newest wave of threats followed claims about Nolan Wells’ phone. Andrew Garrett, a forensic examiner hired by the family, said in late September that messages had been deleted between Wells’ last use of the phone and the time his family got it back. The friends denied touching it. In the Fox interview, they said any deletions came from other Snapchat users, not from anyone physically handling his phone.
Garrett has since clarified his own findings. He explained that on Snapchat, the person on the other end of a conversation can remotely delete messages from someone else’s phone, and that is what happened here. He said he never claimed anyone unlocked the phone and went through it. According to his data, the phone was last used around 2:17 p.m. on July 4 and stayed locked until it was back with the family on July 5.
District Attorney Angel Myers McIlrath has also pushed back. She said Crump’s team allowed the public to believe several false narratives, including that items were deleted from the phone before it was returned to the family. She said a report her office received from Crump’s own team showed nothing had been deleted since Wells last used it.
Attorneys for the three friends have said they plan to sue Crump for defamation, which means damaging someone’s reputation with false statements. Crump has also pointed to Snapchat messages he says show some of Wells’ friends were worried that people on Horn Island could be racist.
The harassment has not been limited to one side. People reported in August that Nolan Wells’ parents have also been targeted, and that multiple people have been arrested for allegedly making threats connected to the case.
