OCEAN SPRINGS, Miss. — On July 6, Nolan Wells, an 18-year-old New Afrikan-Filipino American freshman football player at Southwest Mississippi Community College, was found dead on the northwestern tip of Horn Island, 10 miles off the Mississippi Gulf Coast. On the 250th anniversary of the founding of the capitalist-imperialist U.S. Old State, Wells went on a boat trip with three of his friends, all of whom were white, when they arrived at the barrier island, where he was last seen. The mainstream narrative follows that Wells chose to stay behind on Horn Island while his white friends returned to shore that night “with the assumption that he was going to ride back to the mainland with someone else.” Murky circumstances of his disappearance prompted his mother, Christine Wonsley, to publicly report him missing and ask for help on social media, gaining widespread national attention.
His family retained civil rights attorney Ben Crump amidst the controversial investigation. Various legal agents of the Old State, including Jackson County Sheriff John Ledbetter and other authorities, claim they suspect Wells drowned and found no foul play; more damning is the “cooperation” of Wells’ friends from the boat trip that night, fueling more narratives of Wells’ death as not a crime and merely circumstantial. His parents sat down with county District Attorney Angel Myers McIlrath on July 15, where she told them her plans to present findings to the grand jury, determining whether there was wrongdoing and if anyone should be indicted; however, given the conduct of the law officials, the parents have continued to push for transparency and justice for their son.
They both questioned why Wells did not have his key nor phone with him by the time of arrival to Horn Island, notwithstanding recent misinformation spread by the bourgeois press to inadvertently criminalize Wells; his keys and phone were taken by his friends. Wells was known by his family to use Snapchat avidly, but there were no posts nor messages from the 24-hour period of July 4 to 5. Even more so, 200 locals were on the island that night, raising more suspicions as to why Wells was not given a ride home if he wanted to stay.
Recently, new audio of a phone call to Sea Tow from the night of Wells’ death surfaced and was cleaned up by Black woman audio engineer, Jeanetta Brantley. Using traditional audio processing techniques instead of AI, the enhanced audio fueled the demands for deeper investigation and suspicions of Wells’ friends as suspects in his death. As of now, the Old State has made no comment on the enhanced audio from the Sea Tow call.
Wells’ funeral was held on July 20 at Ocean Springs’ Center Pointe Church, succeeded by visitation from 9-11pm Central and commenced with a repast, hosted by the family at the Jackson County Fairgrounds where it was attended by family, close friends and former teammates alike. Mississippi resides in the heart of the Black Belt, the oppressed New Afrikan nation, with a long history of armed national resistance and vigilante violence against Black people, stemming from chattel slavery, dispossession of the Choctaw nation, and the devastating failure of Reconstruction in 1877.
Wells, an Afro-Filipino youth in the Deep South, is not an isolated case of the bourgeois saying, “wrong place, wrong time,” but a stark representation of the intensification of the struggles of the Black and Filipino people toward national liberation from U.S. Imperialism. The recent nationwide address by bureaucrat-capitalist Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in the Philippines and proclamation of the Obama Presidential Library on the South Side of Chicago hold one thing in common: the persistence of the Old Society to advance their means of plunder, reaction and death against the Black, Filipino and other oppressed peoples of the world.
The conduct of the legal apparatus in the investigation of Nolan Wells’ death proves once again that it is wholly unreliable in delivering rightful justice for the people. Justice can only be won through the building of People’s Assemblies, led by the multinational working class and oppressed peoples of the U.S. at the points of production, a task inextricably linked to defeating imperialism and building a new socialist, self-determining society.
In conjunction with the above piece, The Masses Editorial Board has chosen to republish the following statement released by Anakbayan DC concerning the death of Nolan Wells:
“Anakbayan DC vehemently condemns the murder of Corey Ruiz by the Madison Police Department in Wisconsin, the police killing of a 17-year-old in Austin, TX, as well as the Jackson County Sheriff’s dismissal of concerns surrounding the death of Mississippi teenager, Nolan Wells. We reaffirm our commitment to the struggle for Black liberation, which is interconnected with the National Democratic struggle for Philippine liberation, as part of the international anti-imperialist and anti-fascist movement.”
