Christine and Elmore Wonsley don’t sleep. They can’t, not since their 18-year-old son, Nolan Wells, first went missing.
“This was our baby boy,” Christine Wonsley said, wearing blue to match Wells’ father, the couple тιԍнтly holding hands. “I birthed him.”
Wonsley is now fighting for answers, so that she may find peace in knowing she did everything possible to uncover the truth behind her son’s death, she told CNN’s Victor Blackwell on Saturday.
It’s been one week since Wells and his friends went on a Fourth of July trip to Horn Island — an uninhabited stretch of pristine wilderness off the Mississippi coast with no shelters, no facilities and no communications.
His friends made it back home. Wells, a student and wide receiver at Southwest Mississippi Community College, did not. His body was found by a National Park Service agent face down in the water off the shoreline Monday morning.
Now, many questions remain unanswered: Why didn’t he return on the boat with his friends? Why didn’t he have his cellphone with him? Was Wells involved in an altercation? Did he break off from his friends to speak with a girl on the island?
While the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department is still investigating, Wells’ death has stoked speculation and distrust in part due to Mississippi’s fraught racial history, the fact that Wells appeared to be the only person of color in an image with friends on the trip, and an earlier comment from the sheriff saying he didn’t suspect foul play — but didn’t explain why.
“This does not smell right,” the Rev. Al Sharpton said at a news conference Friday. “Some people are saying, ‘Reverend, are y’all bringing in race?’ Well, we’re not bringing in race. But we’re not discounting race, either, because we don’t know what it is. So, to tell us, ‘Don’t rush to judgment saying it was racist’ is fine. But then I’m telling you, ‘Don’t rush to judgment saying it was not racism,’ because we do not know.”
But nothing about the case — other than speculation about race — is particularly unusual, CNN law enforcement analyst Charles Ramsey said. It’s quite common for law enforcement officers to take a week or longer to gather all the necessary evidence and interviews to determine what caused a death.
Those days and weeks, however, can feel like eternity for a family desperate for answers.
Here’s what the investigation could entail:
Key interviews
It’s important to interview each of the friends Wells traveled with, anyone who was on the beach at the time, and a girl he was purportedly talking to on the island, Ramsey said.
“They’ve got to interview them one at a time, individually, to make sure the story is consistent,” said Ramsey, who previously led the Philadelphia and Washington, DC, police departments.
Jackson County Sheriff John Ledbetter did not respond to CNN’s questions Friday, including whether all of Wells’ friends from the trip had been interviewed. But Ledbetter previously told CNN affiliate WXXV, “It’s gonna take a lot of hard work” to get to the bottom of this case.
Attorney Ben Crump, who’s representing Wells’ family, said he’s dismayed by the lack of clear details that have emerged in the case.
“A young woman he was talking to says that ‘Well, Nolan said he was going back to get on the boat with the boys.’ The boys say that Nolan told them he was going to stay and talk to the young woman. It’s a contradiction,” Crump said.
Questions about Wells’ phone
One of the stranger parts of the case involves Wells’ cellphone. Crump has said it’s bizarre for a teenager to not have his cellphone and noted that Wells’ parents managed to find the phone before police did.
Wells’ mother, Christine Wonsley, tracked his phone using Life360, according to Crump — a real-time GPS monitoring app developed to enhance family safety.
His phone was allegedly found at “one of the boys’ house who own the boat,” Crump said in a virtual appearance during Sunday service at Georgia-based New Birth Missionary Baptist Church.
The parents said location history data found on the phone left them with questions. They also expressed concerns that messages or images may have been deleted from the device.
After tracking down his keys and his phone, the family compared Wells’ location history between the Life360 and Snapchat apps — but the data didn’t match, his parents told “Good Morning America” last week.
CNN has reached out to the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department for more information.
There’s also been speculation that Wells was in an altercation shortly before he was reported missing.
Wells’ mother said her son was not a confrontational person and avoided bickering.
“Nolan was not someone who liked fights, physical fights. He really didn’t even like arguments,” Christine Wonsley said.
An area known for rough currents
The 18-year-old’s body was found in the water just off the shore on the northwestern end of Horn Island, Jackson County Coroner Bruce Lynd said.
“The swimsuit he was wearing matched those that was in the pH๏τograph that he was last known to be wearing,” Lynd told CNN on Friday.
Crump, the family’s attorney, cast doubt on the notion that Wells may have drowned — saying the teen was a strong athlete and knew how to swim.
But the barrier islands off the Mississippi coast have a history of powerful currents and drowning deaths, the coroner said.
“The currents are strong out there — especially on that end of the island,” Lynd said. “There have been drownings out in the barrier islands many times over the years.”
There were no immediate, obvious signs of foul play or trauma on Wells’ body, the coroner said. But due to the uncertain circumstances, “we asked for an autopsy (at) the state medical examiner’s office so that they could do the full autopsy and be able to tell if there was any foul play or trauma,” Lynd said.
The findings from that autopsy — including Wells’ cause and manner of death — are not yet available, as the medical examiner’s office is waiting for the results of routine toxicology tests. And those can take days or weeks.
“I’ve waited as long as two, three weeks for toxicology,” Ramsey said.
In the meantime, the family has launched its own investigation into what may have caused the teen’s death.
Parents send their son’s body out of state for second autopsy
Crump said he believes if Wells had drowned, somebody would have seen him struggling or offered help — though drowning can be fast, silent and doesn’t always look like one might expect, the National Drowning Prevention Alliance says.
“It is not adding up. And that’s why the family, at their behest, we had an independent autopsy being performed,” Crump said Friday.
“We had his body flown from Mississippi to Washington, DC, because his family wanted to make sure that they had a doctor who had no ties to Mississippi law enforcement to do an independent examination of their son’s body.”
Those results are expected “very soon,” Crump said Saturday.
‘There are all kinds of possibilities’
Ramsey, who is Black, said he understands why some Mississippians might be concerned about whether race played a role in Wells’ death or the investigation. He expressed deep condolences to the family for their immense tragedy.
But so far, he said, there is nothing surprising about the timeline of this investigation and how it’s proceeding.
“It’s not unusual. What’s unusual is the degree of media attention,” he said. “The only reason we’re having this conversation (is) it happened in Mississippi. He’s a Black kid, and he went out there with friends who happen to be White.”
“Regardless of the color of anyone’s skin, your hope is that the people your children call friends will be there,” Wonsley, Wells’ mother, told CNN on Saturday. “Unfortunately, there are just so many patterns here in America when you start to talk about the African community. We’ve seen this time and time again.”
Wonsley said she’s seen the “discourse” surrounding her son’s situation, along with the question some have posed: “How can these Black parents just allow their son to be the token Black boy of the group?” she said.
“Nolan was friends with everybody,” Wonsley said. “Nolan was a peacemaker. He wanted everybody to feel included.”
Wells, Wonsley said, would have made sure his friends made it home. “Nolan had such a big heart. That was a concern we always had, is that his heart was just too big, because sometimes … that type of love that you give to others is not always reciprocated.”
There are numerous possible reasons why Wells was not with his friends at the end of the trip, Ramsey said. And the potential circumstances surrounding Wells’ death aren’t limited to foul play or accidental drowning.
“There are all kinds of possibilities,” he said. “You’d go nuts trying to speculate about every possible thing that might have happened. And the bottom line is it takes evidence to really kind of reconstruct what took place.”
Even if Wells drowned, “there’s a variety of reasons why an individual can drown,” Ramsey said.
Much of the criticism, speculation and anger on social media this week came after the local sheriff issued a statement saying, “no foul play was suspected.”
That may have been a poor choice of words that led to widespread misunderstanding, Ramsey said. It may have been more accurate to say there were no immediate, obvious signs of foul play — similar to what the coroner told CNN.
But until the results of the autopsies are released and investigators say what they believe caused Wells’ death, anyone speculating or jumping to conclusions would be doing “a disservice to the family,” Ramsey said.
A family’s nightmare
Christine Wonsley’s brain is “mush,” she says, her emotions all over the place.
“I cannot express how hard this has been … Not just us as parents, but also his siblings,” Wonsley said. “They are struggling too with the fact that they do not have their brother.”
Wells was set to return to school to begin football training on the same day his body was found close to the shore.
On Saturday, peaceful protesters gathered in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, where Wells graduated from high school, demanding a transparent investigation into his death.
One resident, Jeron Lowery, whom Wells once worked for — renting out water slides and bounce houses — spoke of his kindness and respectful nature.
“It says a lot about his parents and it says a lot about him,” Lowery told CNN affiliate WLOX. “The things that he did while he was here on Earth, it left a statement in a place in a lot of people’s hearts. Life is precious. No matter what color you are,” he said.
CNN’s Devon M. Sayers, Maria Sole Campinoti, Chelsea Bailey, Ryan Young, Amanda Musa and Elizabeth Wolfe contributed to this report.
💔 STELLA PARTON BREAKS HER SILENCE — What She Said About Dolly’s Health Has Fans Looking Back
Dolly Parton’s Sister Breaks Silence What Really Happened - GMT - G1
Stella Parton was born May 4, 1949, the sixth of twelve children raised by Robert Lee and Avie Lee Parton in Sevierville, Tennessee — a household defined by noise, limited money, and almost no privacy, the kind of environment that produced strong, determined personalities.
Stella was one of them.
By seven, she was appearing alongside her older sister Dolly on a Knoxville television program; by her teens, she was writing her own songs, though marriage and motherhood pulled music to the margins of her life for a stretch.
The dream never fully disappeared.
In 1967, she recorded a gospel album with her mother and sisters, and later worked clubs in Washington, D.C., before founding her own record label in 1975 and releasing “I Want to Hold You in My Dreams Tonight,” which climbed to number nine on the country charts.
Long before any of that commercial success, Stella had already shown a willingness to take positions others avoided.
At 26, amid backlash against Australian singer Olivia Newton-John for winning recognition in country music, Stella recorded “Ode to Olivia” in her defense — a stand that offered her no career benefit and real risk of criticism, but one she took anyway simply because she believed staying silent was the wrong choice.
That instinct defined the rest of her career: hits like “The Danger of a Stranger” and “Steady as the Rain” (written by Dolly) built a genuine, independent following, including in the U.K., while Stella also worked in New York theater and spoke openly, often controversially, about poverty, domestic violence, and the treatment of women in the music industry.
She was named the Christian Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year in 2004.
Through all of it, she remained defined publicly, more often than not, as simply “Dolly’s little sister” — a label she spent five decades quietly proving didn’t tell the full story.
That same directness is why her comments in the fall of 2025 carried real weight.
Stella had never positioned herself as the family’s image manager or spokesperson; she was, by reputation, someone who believed difficult truths shouldn’t stay hidden indefinitely.
What she described wasn’t dramatic or accusatory — it was a portrait of a woman who had spent years prioritizing everyone else’s needs over her own.
The context mattered.
Carl Dean, Dolly’s husband of nearly sixty years, died in March 2025 at 82, after a long illness during which Dolly had devoted herself almost entirely to his care.
She later acknowledged that in the process, she’d neglected her own health significantly.
The loss reverberated through the whole extended family — the Partons had lost three brothers in the years surrounding this period, compounding grief that, for a family that had once crowded twelve children into a single small home, meant losing pieces of a shared childhood one after another.
Stella herself went seven years without releasing new music during this stretch, later describing the period simply as one shaped by sorrow, while still speaking about the importance of finding moments of laughter within it.
Looking back, one moment reads very differently in hindsight than it did at the time: in late September 2025, Dolly postponed her planned Las Vegas residency, citing health challenges — a rare cancellation for a performer whose six-decade career had included very few of them.
At the time, most fans treated it as a minor, temporary setback.
Stella’s later reflections suggested the signs had actually been building for some time, visible to family in ways the public smile made easy to miss.
That concern crystallized publicly not long after, when Dolly’s younger sister Frieda posted a simple request on Facebook asking fans to pray for Dolly.
What looked at first like an ordinary, well-meaning gesture spread rapidly, sparking widespread speculation about how serious Dolly’s condition actually was.
Dolly herself responded directly within days, appearing in a video from a Grand Ole Opry commercial shoot, insisting with her familiar humor that she wasn’t finished yet — the now widely remembered “I ain’t dead yet” moment that briefly quieted public concern.
In the months that followed, the pattern repeated: reassuring updates about kidney stones, dehydration, and treatment, paired with continued work on new projects, right up until Dolly Parton’s death on August 25, 2026, at 80.
Looking back across that full timeline — the postponed residency, the family’s public worry, Stella’s own account of a sister who consistently deprioritized her own wellbeing — it becomes easier to see what the people closest to Dolly understood well before the rest of the world did: that the warmth and resilience the public saw every time she appeared on camera came at a real, largely invisible cost.
