By admin 
Civil rights attorney Ben Crump and members of his legal team on Thursday presented the results of a forensic examination of Nolan Xavier Wells’ cellphone, including hundreds of Snapchat messages and location data they say provide a detailed timeline of the 18-year-old’s phone’s movements before and after his death.
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“There were things that were deleted from the phone,” said Andrew Garrett of Garrett Discovery, a digital forensics firm Crump’s attorneys retained to examine Wells’ cellphone. He presented a video that shows the movement of the cell phone before Wells’ death.
“I can’t talk to intent, unfortunately. That’s not my field of expertise … but I can tell you from a digital standpoint, things were deleted on the phone from the time he last had the phone up until the time that his parents got the phone,” Garrett said.
He said the forensic examination could not identify who deleted the material or why. Additionally, the contents of the deleted messages were not revealed.
“We can say that in order for that to be done, somebody had to take a user action,” he said.
The presentation came two days after Crump and his legal team pledged to continue investigating Wells’ death despite a Jackson County grand jury’s finding that there was insufficient evidence of criminal wrongdoing.
The news conference, held in Orlando, Florida, detailed Wells’ phone’s movement when the teen traveled to Horn Island with friends on July 4. His friends returned from the island without him and took his cellphone with them. They told authorities Wells stayed behind to talk to a girl.
Wells’ body was found July 6 near Horn Island.
“We won’t quit until we get to the truth,” Crump said.
Garrett said the forensic extraction took about 30 hours and produced more than 1 million digital artifacts, including data that would not normally be accessible to a cellphone user after it had been deleted or disappeared from applications such as Snapchat.
The extraction showed activity on Wells’ phone before and after he was last known to have it.
Snapchat messages and deleted data
Garrett said Wells rarely used text messaging and, like many young people, relied on Snapchat and Instagram to communicate with friends.
During the examination, Garrett said he and his team recovered 282 pages of Snapchat messages. Crump said the messages had been provided to Jackson County District Attorney Angel Myers McIlrath for presentation to the grand jury as it considered whether Wells’ death was the result of criminal wrongdoing.
Garrett said the messages helped establish a timeline of Wells’ activity and provided information about conversations among members of his various friend groups.
The phone also contained records showing when applications were opened, when the screen was activated, when applications were moved into the background and other interactions with the device.
Garrett said those records allowed his team to reconstruct activity on the phone even after a user deleted information.
During the presentation, Crump highlighted a Snapchat conversation in which a group of Wells’ friends discussed people on Horn Island and whether they could be dangerous or racist.
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The conversation included references to two men who, according to Crump, were possible felons and were on a boat behind the group on July 4.
Crump said the messages were significant because they showed that concerns about race and the possibility of encountering racist people on Horn Island had been discussed among young people connected to Wells before the case became a national story.
“We don’t know if it was racist or not,” Crump said.
Crump said his legal team was not accusing anyone of a crime based on the messages but maintained that the investigation into Wells’ death should continue despite the grand jury’s finding of insufficient evidence of criminal wrongdoing.
“We would hope that everybody who says they’re Nolan’s friends won’t deal with distractions, but will be laser focused like us in getting to the truth of what happened to Nolan Xavier Wells,” he said.
GPS data confirms movement
The forensic extraction also included GPS data that tracked the phone’s movement from the morning of July 4 through the next morning, when a group, including Wells’ father, went to one of the friends’ homes to retrieve Wells’ phone.
The phone’s GPS data appeared to align with tracking data released by the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources after Wells’ body was found.
The extraction showed Wells’ phone was locked after the group arrived at Horn Island around 11:18 a.m. July 4. The activity on his phone resumed around 2:17 p.m., when the phone was unlocked.
“That is when Nolan was last using his phone,” Garrett said, and the location data indicated Wells’ phone was on a boat at that time. The data showed the phone traveling across the water on a boat before reaching a boat ramp at 7:24 p.m. on July 4.
Garrett also said his team recovered photographs and videos of other boats that helped corroborate portions of the GPS timeline.
“The extraction we made to the phone also includes messages after Nolan was dead,” Garrett said. “The individuals that are part of this chat group continued talking after he was dead, not understanding that their messages were also syncing onto Nolan’s phone.”
Those messages continued among the friends in the chat group until Wells’ parents received the phone at about 3 a.m. July 5.
No fluid or debris in his lungs
Since the grand jury’s ruling, the Wells’ family received a copy of the Mississippi State Medical Examiner’s autopsy report.
The three-page report showed that Wells’ had two, 2-inch bruises with blood on the back of his head. It also showed no fluid or debris in his lungs.
“What this means is that there’s no water in the stomach, there’s no water in the lungs, there’s no water in the throat,” Attorney Liza Park said. “And yet the grand jury… wants to determine it was an accidental drowning, but this is their own medical examiner’s report.”
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