Civil rights lawyer Ben Crump releases data from Nolan Wells’s cellphone

Messaging ‘very telling’, says Crump after grand jury said it found no evidence of criminal conduct in teen’s death

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump released information from a forensic examination of Nolan Wells’s cellphone as well as details of the official autopsy on Thursday, just days after a Mississippi grand jury said it found no evidence of criminal conduct in the teenager’s death.

Attorneys representing the 18-year-old Black college student’s family have called for transparency, asking that the grand jury investigative materials and the official autopsy report be publicly released.

Crump and his team discussed the contents of the cellphone analysis, but they did not release a full report of all the messages sent and received in the days leading up to and the day of Wells’s death.

The grand jury had access to that information, including 282 pages of Snapchat conversations, when it convened last week, according to the panel’s report and Crump. Crump said the forensic examiner was able to track messages received and sent and tie them to the location of Wells’ phone from the day before he went missing all the way up to when his family got the phone back.

“The messaging, as I said, was very telling … some of his own friends were concerned about [how] people on Horn Island can be racist,” Crump said Thursday.

Wells’s family and their legal team have condemnde the grand jury report and have been working to keep the investigation open and active. They have asked for federal authorities to look into the events surrounding Wells’s death. His body was found two days after he went with a group of mostly white friends on a boat trip to a barrier island for a 4 July party.

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