Jackson County District Attorney Angel Myers McIlrath says no one accessed Nolan Wells’ phone after he last used it and before his parents received it, pushing back on questions raised by deleted Snapchat messages found during a private examination of the device.
Forensic investigator Andrew Garrett said Thursday that Wells unlocked his phone with Face ID and communicated with others on July 4, the day he disappeared.
Garrett also said Snapchat data was deleted before Wells’ parents got the phone. He said someone had to take a “user action” to delete it, but did not identify who took that action.
McIlrath offered a different explanation hours after Garrett and civil rights attorney Ben Crump presented their findings. In a statement, she said other Snapchat users deleted the messages from their end. She said the information her office received before the grand jury found no evidence that anyone physically accessed Wells’ phone after his last known use.
“If the Crump team has evidence to the contrary, they have not provided it to us,” McIlrath said in a public statement.
The distinction matters because Snapchat users can delete messages they sent without handling the recipient’s phone. Garrett’s finding that messages were deleted does not, by itself, establish that someone unlocked Wells’ device after he disappeared. His team has not publicly identified the deleted messages or explained how it determined which user deleted them.
According to Garrett, data show Wells’ phone stayed on the boat until 7 p.m. when it returned to shore and that Nolan last accessed the phone around 2:18 p.m.
His parents received it from friends around 3 a.m. the next day. Searchers found the 18-year-old’s body in the water near Mississippi’s Horn Island two days after the outing.
McIlrath also disputed how much of Garrett’s examination her office received. Garrett said his team extracted roughly 1 million data artifacts and gave prosecutors a preliminary review followed by a full report. The district attorney said her office received two emails containing about 300 pages of selected findings, but never received the full digital download he discussed at the news conference.
She accused Crump’s team of waiting until late in the grand jury process to conduct its private examination and providing jurors only portions of the results. Crump’s team said it offered prosecutors the phone data. The family refused to hand over the device unless they could attend the examination, as their attorneys said the parties had agreed.
McIlrath also addressed the independent autopsy by Dr. Roger A. Mitchell Jr., which documented an unexplained blunt-force injury to the back of Wells’ head. She said neither Mitchell nor the state medical examiner found evidence of a fatal injury. Her statement did not say Mitchell specifically concluded that the injury to the back of Wells’ head was nonfatal. Without his grand jury testimony, it is unclear whether he made that more specific assessment there.
Neither pathologist determined Wells’ cause or manner of death. A Jackson County grand jury nevertheless found the position, condition and location of his body consistent with drowning and declined to charge anyone.
