Nolan’s phone: the full forensic briefing

Good morning, I'm attorney Ben Crump along with attorney Lisa

Park, attorney Eric Hertz, attorney Ahmaud Smith, attorney Christian Clark, and attorney

Julie Winter, attorney Camila Moore.

We have the honor of representing the family of Nolan Xavier Wells.

As we told you on Tuesday, we would be having a press conference with our forensic expert

and that time is now.

We wanted to make sure that we continue to try to be very transparent and laser focused

on what really happened to Nolan Wells.

It's what everybody is talking about all across America and I found out yesterday while I was

in New York at the United Nations General Assembly, I spoke on some panels where when

Al Sharpton also addressed some dignitaries while at the UN during UN week and it was

fascinating to me that diplomats from England, diplomats from France, and diplomats from Germany

and diplomats from many African nations all came up to me and said, attorney Crump, we read

the news accounts of the grand jury, we read the report.

What really happened to Nolan Wells because we don't think that he drowned either.

These are people all across the world asking what happened to Nolan Xavier Wells and so

we continue, as I told them, we won't quit until we get to the truth.

Today is another step on the journey to get to truth because I understood with our legal

team to get to the truth of what happened to Nolan Wells on day one.

It was going to take primarily two things to get to the truth of what happened to Nolan

Wells on Horn Island in Mississippi on July 4th.

It was going to, number one, take courage to speak truth to power and it was going to

take courage to make sure you got the truth.

Secondly, I knew for us to get to the truth, we were going to have to work with the very

best experts and that's why we sought out through attorney Eric Hertz who is leading

the investigation on behalf of our legal team, Andrew Garrett, and Garrett Discovery, one

of the leading forensic experts as it relates to Discovery in all America.

Attorney Hertz will go into further detail about his credentials and about why the Department

of Defense and the Department of Justice calls on Garrett's discovery when they have important

matters, important matters of national interest.

They call on Garrett Discovery and so did we.

And you all know about Dr. Roger Mitchell who we will be talking with later about the

mounting cause of death.

But today it is about the extraction of the cell phone, the process that he did, the interactions

that happened with Nolan's cell phone after he, after it left his possession and before

it was returned to his family.

We know that the last text message that Nolan Xavier Wells sent was on July 3rd around 8.30

p.m. where he said thank you to his Auntie Gabby and what his parents and family shared

with us, this was common because many, Nolan was like many teenagers.

They don't use their mother and father text messaging.

They use Snapchat and so they went through this process of the traditional text messaging

and then they painstakingly and you're going to hear in detail how they manually had to

retrieve the Snapchats and the fact that him and all of his friends, all his friend groups,

all these high schoolers and young college students, they communicate on Snapchat.

And so we have all of the Snaps, I mean all of them from his friend group, the district

attorney office has them and soon as we got them finished from Andrew Garrett and his associates,

we got them over to her.

So they held all 282 pages of the Snaps and that's really important because there's Snaps

between Nolan's friend groups and now we won't divulge any of their names for privacy

purposes but they were very telling and very enlightening, these Snaps between their

friend groups.

It's really profound because not only did we retrieve the Snaps but also Andrew Garrett and

his associates at Garrett Discovery were able to use location tracking of Nolan's cell phone.

So we have a definitive timeline now based on the movement of the cell phone and Mr.

Garrett and you will see it with him and attorney Hertz goes through an automation video

of the tracking of the movements of Nolan Wells cell phone because it is crucial that we find

out what happened to Nolan Xavier Well's Snaps.

The messaging as I said was very telling.

I know a lot of people talked about people making about race, talking about race.

You heard that from the district attorney statements.

Well it is very interesting to note that not only were people across America concerned with

the history of the state of Mississippi, whether race would be an issue but the messages

on his phone in the Snaps will show some of his own friends were concerned about people

on Horn Island can be racist.

That's his friends discussing that on Snap.

So yeah, a lot of people were thinking about whether there was a racial component in this

tragedy of Nolan Wells being unalived and as we said, we don't know if it was racist

or not, but what we do know is that his parents have never accepted that it was simply an accidental

drowning and that nobody knows nothing, that nobody saw nothing.

I mean with the blunt force trauma to his head, the abrasions to his back, those factors,

our medical examiner believe cannot be discounted, cannot be just swept away.

Not when you have a young 18 year old college student, football scholarship athlete in tip

top shape who you say drowned and you look at the statistics of when the last person

drowned on Horn Island and the depth of the water they claim he drowned in.

Dr. Roger Mitchell is going to discuss all of that with you all next week and as we

said, we're just trying to get to the truth.

We haven't accused anybody and we would hope that everybody who says they're Nolan's

friends won't deal with distractions but would be laser focused like us and get to the truth

of what happened to Nolan and Xavier Well's, their classmate.

We hope that everybody will focus on that and not focus on distractions.

So we have snaps again from friends in the friend group, the snaps disappear but thankfully

because we have one of the best forensic experts in America, he was able to go and retrieve

those snaps, snaps that probably the people who sent them can't even get now because

they disappear and so one of the snaps conversations talked about, do you all remember real sketchy

looking guys behind us in two boats?

I mean like, yeah, that one that looked like, and I won't say the name, maybe, apparently

the guy was real skinny, the ones that were right behind us, yes, yes, one was black and

one was white.

Well those guys were apparently like felons or something, at least one of them and they

were there when we were all gone, I think, are you sure, yes, they were.

My dad, and I'm not calling any of the names because we're trying to protect the privacy,

my dad had to walk this lady to her boat because she knew one of them and sheriffs

talking to my dad said something like, you wouldn't want to be left alone with them, especially

if they're really drunk, what the, there are so many people out there so I don't know if

they could have even done something but I don't know, nobody's accepting that it was

accidental drowning, even the friends are talking about, they are concerned about what

really happened to Nolan Wells, y'all let's don't be distracted, let's stay focused on what

the real issue here, the real issue is what caused the blunt force trauma to the back

of Nolan Wells head, what caused Nolan Wells to be found two days later face down on the

shores of Horn Island after he had went with his friends on 4th of July celebrating, we

are going to now have attorney Liza Park who's leading this effort for us talk to you a little

bit about the process leading into the phone extra case, extra, I'm sorry, extraction,

everything that led up to it because that was important, you remember we we desired to do a joint

extraction of the cell phones and so we wanted to make sure you knew from Mr. Garrett's perspective

the things that they were very willing to work with Mississippi law enforcement and the district

attorney to do just that, to honor our agreement and so I'm going to have attorney Liza Park come

now present to you, attorney Park. Thank you, so I'm going to talk about how we got to today

with the presentation of the extraction of Nolan Wells' cell phone and the reason why

we're going to address this is because this became a big controversy, it was filled with

misinformation and a lot of assumptions. The first thing that I want to clear up is that

the parents of Nolan Wells never kept the phone intentionally so they would keep it away

from the district attorney or any law enforcement. I've explained before in a previous press conference

that there was a meeting of the district attorney and the attorneys and the family of Nolan Wells

on July 15th in Mississippi at the DA's office. That meeting was incredibly important because it

was the first time that the family and their attorneys, their representatives were in person

meeting with the DA in her office and it was setting the parameters of where do we go from here,

how do we work with each other because we think we have the same goals. We all want to find out

what happened with Nolan Wells so in that meeting it was decided with respect to the cell phone

that there would be an extraction of the phone and that everybody would do it together, right?

One time full extraction and you'll find out an extraction isn't like when you go to

your cell phone carrier and you get it kind of copied over, you get a new phone, no it's not

that. It can take hours and hours. It can take more than a day. A full extraction. We'll let Mr.

Garrett go through this more in detail but that's one of the reasons why you want to do it one time.

You also just want to make sure like we handle evidence in lots of cases that you're there

representing your folks and anybody else, any other interested party is there too

so your witnesses for each other, right? You know what's happening with that extraction.

You're not wondering oh we got it first and then we downloaded things, we're going to do it another

time and was it done the same way? Did they somehow delete anything? No questions, right? It's

the best, most efficient and fair way of doing things so everyone agreed to it. This was the

July 15th meeting. A date was not set though on July 15th. Everybody needed to figure out

what times were and because the experts weren't at that meeting we had to find out from our experts,

they needed to find out from their law enforcement when could this happen, right? What was decided

was that it was going to happen in Mississippi. Specifically it was going to happen at a

community college there in that district, right? We weren't familiar with this community college.

It's not our backyard so if you're going to agree that something's going to take place

at your house, that person that has the house, they kind of need to invite others,

right? They need to take the lead on when is this going to happen because they have the

location. We never had the location. We agreed to go to their location.

Dates never matched up. Communication happened but never got a date. Then comes July 29th

and we get a letter from the DA basically saying you guys aren't communicating with us

so we need that phone and then later she sends another letter to the Welles Wandsley saying

you have 48 hours to get the phone over and so we can extract. Nothing about this joint meeting

because the parents have that's their phone. They had already set up where they lawfully have the

phone. Lawfully have the phone and as the DA explained in one of her letters which you should

all have access to, if she had the authority to take that phone she would already have done so

but she didn't have that authority so what we should have done which was in that original

meeting, meet together, extract the phone. Somehow the wheels fell off on that and communication

became strained and when at around that point is when we started to communicate with her via

letter and then we would send that letter out to the media because that's when people started to

accuse the Welles Wandsleys about holding on to the phone or what were they doing with the phone.

Nothing they were just holding waiting for it. What we had done after the July 15th meeting

is that we contacted this man Andrew Garrett and said we're going to have a phone extraction.

Is that something that you can do and can you be ready at any moment's notice to go

to Mississippi to do that? Their office is here. That's where you're at right now in Orlando.

Yes, they could. We just needed to know when. We just didn't get that. We never really got it

is the thing and so when we got a letter saying again here you've got this certain amount of time

to get this phone in we asked that Garrett Discovery go ahead and come in and extract

the phone for the parents and then we could hand off the phone but as we explained

extracting the phone can take a long time and it did. It took almost 24 hours.

So what we're wanting you to understand for America to understand again is that the Welles

Wandsleys were cooperating as much as they could possibly could with respect to this phone and

be right. So Ben is reminding me that the facility that they chose

at this community college happens to be under the authority of law enforcement

and although at the time of the meeting on July 15th they didn't quite explain this

and the only people that could go in were current law enforcement not the family

not attorneys not former law enforcement only current law enforcement so basically no one from

the Welles Wandsleys that would just be giving away their phone. So

when we've been asked by some media what happened with the extraction did the grand jury get

the extraction information we did give it to the district attorney all the pages everything

we don't know what happened in the grand jury we don't know how it was presented how any of the

information was used or disseminated but what we are going to do now is explain what the extraction

means and give you the information that we can and when I say the information that we can

it's because we still need to protect people's privacy right so this is what we hope to achieve

today we know that it's taking some some time but there was a lot that we wanted to dispel

but because even up until we got the word that the grand jury had finished their work

and here was their result a no bill up until that time we've been playing by the rules

we haven't been putting anything forth that we had it's done so here we are and that's why

we're going to have these press conferences to finally reveal what may or may have been revealed

in the grand jury this is what we know with that I think that I'm going to yes

okay let me give it back to bed okay thank you uh attorney part and to be clear

the agreement was to do a joint extraction of the phone

mr garrett troy their associates were ready to do it but then was told no you can't come in

you have to give the phone to us at that point the wiles wesley family said well no download the

stuff before you give my baby phone because we don't know when we would get it back they were

concerned as any parent would and so that's where garrett discovery went and they started downloading

the phone and it took about 30 some hours to do so and then at that point we were going

to give the phone district attorney said okay well the family has decided to do their own

extraction that's fine with us we said well we were going to give you the phone but if you

say no y'all always started to download it y'all just give us the report that's exactly what

we did and she wanted it as soon as possible we gave her a preliminary report and we kept saying

you know this is preliminary because they were doing everything they could to get into the snaps

and all the other social media because we know that's how young people communicate that the

traditional uh your mother and father text messaging is not what they do and so they sent

that there or that preliminary report and it had limited you know um discoveries and so forth but

they kept working and that's how they got to deleted messages on snapchat and different things

and so with that we're going to have attorney eric hurts talk to you uh about his investigation

and introduce our forensic expert andrew gear who i have to commend him in his office

they worked tirelessly to try to help christine and elmore wansley find out what happened

to their child and i thank them for it um attorney hurts thank you for leaving this investigation

thank you mr crump i'm eric hurts thank you all for showing up here today and taking interest in

this this is a very important case as mr crump just told you not only is the nation wanting to

know what happened to young nolan but the world is and what better time to introduce you to andrew

garrett from digital forensic expert from garrett discovery and we're here today in his building

mr garrett is not just a national renowned expert he's an international renowned expert

he has worked with the department of defense he has worked with the department of justice

he recently worked for the district attorney of louisiana and even the district attorney

in mississippi cannot say a bad thing about him he's worked with our country to stop terrorism

by helping to digitally for new forensic work as an expert to help stop the terrorism that

we have in this country um i'll tell you that um he's testified over 300 times um he's helped jurors

judges legislators understand cases that couldn't be understood and he does not have a dog in this

fight and he has no opinion as to who or what should be done he's just going to tell you the

science and there's no advocacy in math math is math two plus two equals four and he's going

to show you how two plus two equals four here today um let's get uh i call him andrew because

i've been working with him on this case for a while but mr garrett if you can come up here

where the screen is and let's first talk about the interactions with the phone before um knowing

wells on the fourth interactions with the phone after Nolan Wells hadn't no possession of the

phone anymore and the interactions of the phone after the parents retrieved it and tell us what

you found first of all i'd like to say thank you to ben crump and his legal team um i've worked

with a lot of attorneys over my years about 1500 different law firms this is one of the most serious

law firms i've ever worked for um they want the truth 100 and that was their goal right from the

beginning i explained my job is to analyze digital evidence and tell you the facts no spin no

conjecture no opinions i lay it out on the table let other people formulate those opinions

as to what it means so for nolan's phone we went almost immediately i mean next day straight to

his house and my team thank you detroit christian i actually took took the early morning flight the

head there and forensically copied the phone during the process of forensic forensically

copying the phone it takes a while sometimes you plug the phones in it's an hour or two

sometimes it's going to take quite a bit of time this took about 30 hours so that meant we

blew our deadline by about 12 hours with the government we let them know that by text message

i was communicating with technical field officer reiner we communicated they said that's fine we

can bring in the phone the next day or bring in the forensic image and they would accept it as

is they were completely fine with it there was no nefarious acts there was no contention between

the parties it was completely agreeable what would have happened if you would have stopped

and tried to make this arbitrary deadline to the bonus data yeah so we notified the government

that if we stop the extraction during the process to meet their deadline there's a high possibility

it could break the phone that is just the process that happens when you hook up a phone to forensic

equipment this is specialized forensic equipment this is not somebody doing like an itunes backup

to their mobile phone it takes time specialized tools specialized expertise to copy these phones

but understand that's a complete copy of the phone that includes data you can't see

cached data stuff that the user themselves can't see interactions with the phone what time you

woke the screen up hit the screen and took an app and swiped it away all those details come out

from a forensic examination so in that examination the first thing we did is we issued a preliminary

report because we knew everybody needed something very quick now our job is always about accuracy

speed doesn't matter to us we're going to do it accurate every time and if i have to tell a client

it's going to take longer that's just the way it's going to be because i can't put my name on

something and neither will any of my experts at work in my firm unless it's absolutely accurate

so we issued a preliminary report that explains some things in the phone but there's one thing

that we know no one doesn't use text message but rarely only with people that he doesn't know

has snapchat he uses snapchat and instagram for 95 of his communication okay there are groups

that he's part of that have many many people communicating in okay that process that we use

to get those messages out is using two software tools one's called Cellebrite and one's called

Magnet AXIOM these are the predominant tools that over 95 of law enforcement uses worldwide

unfortunately this phone had a newer version of snapchat in which the software did not support

that required us to manually process the data manually decrypt all the messages and put them

back together that took time a substantial amount of time so it was about a week or so later we

issued a second report that had a swiped himself in use face id communicated and looked at certain

applications then locked the phone again and from that point forward we knew the rest of the data

we need to look at was gps data before you get there can you explain how when somebody swipes the

phone touches the phone whether they're attempting to open it or accidentally how the phone would

track that yes so there are databases and logs in the phone that you can't see unless you add

forensic tools that will tell you whether somebody swiped an app away it actually your phone actually

keeps track of what apps were open and the screenshots you see of the apps you're swiping

away so even if somebody was to delete a message if they had swiped the app away beforehand that

picture that was on screen will be in the forensic image that we created the phone so

we can see what was happening on the phone there's also logs that show whether the power was turned

on or off whether an application was in the front of the screen in the background of the screen so

there's just a ton of information in these phones in Nolan's phone there was over one million

artifacts of data and I'm not talking about a million pictures I'm talking about million

artifacts that tell us forensically what was going on in the phone and that is something

my team Lena Gill, Troy Christian, and Chris Stark and Charon Darththith all worked tirelessly

to try to reconstruct a timeline of events and then we put those things on screen on a 3D video

as well but one of the things we do know is there was interactions with the phone before and after

his death up until the time that his family retrieved the phone from the other young men

that were with him that day and it's really important if you can tell the news whether it

was intentional or non-intentional no that's not your decision your decision is a science

were things deleted from that phone yes there were things that were deleted from the phone

I can't talk to intent unfortunately that's not my field of expertise to psychology but I could

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 and was it snapchat things they

were snapchat correct now you want to I'm sorry I didn't mean to interrupt you but I thought that

was important that everybody understood that was science and you can't put an intent onto it

no I don't I don't talk in the world of intent unfortunately so we can say that in order for

that to be done somebody had to take a user action to delete data with so his parents said

that when they got his phone they thought that things have been deleted and the question is

are they crazy to think that no I think if you were to look at the phone like we did and

look through the message threads and stuff it's you could pit together that things were deleted

now you you did you make a video of where the phone went are you ready to talk about

we took the GPS data from the phone now understand a phone has a GPS chip set in it that receives

signals from outer space and it's pretty accurate you and I use the GPS every day probably on our

phone to navigate so it's pretty accurate usually within 20 to 30 meters at worst on a mobile phone

we have every moment of Nolan's phone from morning to night that day until even into

the next morning until his parents got the phone of everywhere it went that means the boat dock

that means the boat ramp leaving horn island so we have a perfect timeline of where that phone

traveled to how fast it was traveling and where it went to and whose houses we've put together a

video to show the travel patterns of Nolan's phone now understand in this video we did blur

out streets entire streets actual houses and we blurred out names with this to protect some of

the privacy of these individuals that was involved the district attorney has unredacted data they

could look at this they could use this data all they want it's so I'm gonna play it for you here

you actually have the redact the redacted copy that you can give all the news in case their camera

is that correct yes we prepared today because this is voluminous data

usb drives for the media to take with them so you will have a copy of this video to take with you

and some of the reports I just want to make it clear in your final report you gave all the snaps

all the 282 pages all your information to the district attorney's office as well as an

unredacted video that you're about to show us yes they have all the snaps they have every bit

it well first of all they have a forensic image of the phone they could do all this work themselves

they have their own forensic staff and in mississippi i've worked at their district

attorney's office on cases before and the attorney general's office and both and i've

worked for worked pretty closely with their lab director charlie rubisoft for the last 15 years

on various cases where we've been involved in so we've had a relationship there they have

the same tools we have they I don't know if they have the same expertise but I would hope that

somebody over there in law enforcement has the same expertise to be able to look at the same

stuff but to make it easier on them we gave them all of our hard work we gave it to them we gave

it to them on a silver platter so they didn't have to do much work at all they could go in

and validate the data instantly and they could look at all the reports and look at the digital

evidence and say these match 100 percent and therefore it saved them a lot of time and a lot

of effort and especially because they were forming a grand jury my job is not about the grand jury

my job is to give the family truth and honesty and talk about the data the grand jury is not what

i'm there for and and i've told everybody that from the beginning and nobody's ever asked me hey

make sure this is prepared for the grand jury the district attorney never called the state's

attorney's never called anybody that's ever commented about this has never called our office

i know i've never called van krump saying hey get care discovery to move faster

that's not it it was all about the truth and that takes time and you weren't asked to come

and testify before the grand jury no i was not asked to come testify none of my team was and

there's been no communication the only communication we've had with law enforcement is about the

delivery of the phone making sure they knew it was going to take an extra day which they agreed

to and um i do know the district i know that the prosecutor put out some stuff about

they would have met any agreement the parents had for analyzing the phone that's untrue they set the

venue as a place and then told us only law enforcement can come in i mean it's like getting

invited to a party you come to the front lawn but you can't get through the front door

it's not a joint inspection at that point so that's why we felt it's important

for two reasons the family needs to know their last moments of their son they need those photos

they need those communications if it becomes evidence in a law enforcement case if the phone

is handed over there is no legal mechanism whatsoever to get that unless there's a case

filed or a criminal defendant is charged we can't get the phone back it has gone in the wind it could

be locked up for years i work on cases all the time where law enforcement has held a phone for nine

ten years and nobody can get answers that's why it's important to make a forensic copy

before they would not have ever agreed to us making a forensic copy if they thought for a

minute that we would alter any of the data or change anything or it wouldn't be a true and

accurate copy today we're going to show a video this is a video reconstruction i can say that

this is about as accurate as you could get when it comes down to accuracy the accuracy rating inside

the gps points is very very high so that means somewhere within about a 10 meter radius of each

one of the points we plotted shows what was going shows the location of nolan's phone at

the time you can go ahead and hit play if you can you can see here in the early morning

that's before 8 24 a.m you went to mcdonald's there is messages you will see pop up here on

the right hand side these are the snapchat communications that was happening between nolan

and his friends and people that were part of these various groups that he was part of

through 837 they traveled to another another location i'm not going to tell you whose house

or who that is but they did travel another location and you can see that in a vehicle

based on the speed and direction travel still traveling here last snapchat messages

asking about a jewel pod and can i get one these are young men they were having conversations

there were some women in this chat group as well you can see here where they're traveling

by a boat at 10 30 10 30 10 40 10 54 and you can see here still there's messages and phone calls

being made then they were at horn island it's about 11 18 then the boat stayed on horn island

and you can see here it says device enters lock state that means he clicked the button to lock

the phone phone unlocked in application activity resumes at 217 pm that is when nolan was last

using his phone we have about 218 in order to do that by our calculations he was on the boat

when that happened then there's a reported call to see a call to Sea Tow

at 436 there's also messages there's a message that says captain pull the bilge they had a bilge

pump problem they called Sea Tow i think the news has done a great job at reporting on the phone call

that was made then afterwards you can see the boat went up to somebody's house to their dock

then they left the dock and traveled to a boat ramp

the phone was on a boat and the reason we can make that assumption is

phones don't travel on a car by walking over water so on the boat

could be jesky but we would say boat and given the pictures there's actually videos from some

of these boats from that day that we were able to recover there's photos from that day

that we were able to recover that lets us know he was on the boat you can see here at 724 pm

there at a boat ramp yes the phone was traveling over water at a speed and direction that would

have to be from a boat plus we also have videos from another neighboring boat of traveling in the

same direction about the same speed and you can see here this goes up to 730 then on land the phone

is traveling to an individual's residence there is more messages in the chat groups that are not

part of this presentation there are hundreds and hundreds of messages in these chat groups

from various other individuals that aren't the individuals talking about nolan necessarily

are talking about what was going on understand a lot of the individuals in the in the chat groups

didn't know what was going on at the time yet no you know so here's the second thing i have to say

the extraction we made of the phone also includes messages after nolan was dead

that is up until the time we collected the phone the individuals that are part of this

chat group continued talking after he was dead not understanding that their messages were also

sinking onto nolan's phone so we have the messages up and through the date and time we collected the

phone and this goes on until the parents come and pick up the phone at about 3 am in the morning

roughly and that concludes our video presentation as to the activity of the phone and the travel

pattern of the phone thank you very much mr gary if you and your entire staff for helping the family

get answers they so desperately want and i think the world wants quite frankly um it is also

important to note that nolan's parents still are baffled that nolan if he chose to stay on the island

would not want his cell phone they said nolan harley went anywhere did anything without his cell phone

so these are things that still concern them at this time before we get into your questions

have recently been able to get this state

state medical examiner's autopsy and as we said we are going to present evidence pertaining to

the death of nolan wells to the public in an effort to be transparent again we there's only

one issue everything else is a distraction if you really care about nolan wells if you

really care about his family getting to the truth let's don't deal with his distractions

let's just go ahead and deal with getting the evidence out so we we were told that we could

get the autopsy uh when the district attorney released the grand jury report and that was news

to us and so that day attorney amad smith who is or the next day attorney amad smith who is our

local council in the state of mississippi sent a letter to the district attorney dear attorney

McIlrath good afternoon in your statement following the grand jury's no-bill decision you indicated

that you had offered to provide the state's autopsy report to nolan's family on the family's

behalf i now ask you please send us a copy they are eager to review its findings sincerely amad

are smith esquire district attorney Angel Myers McIlrath responds and read death investigation of

nolan wells grand jury report mr smith the law provides for you to request all types of report

through the department of public safety website that's all y'all have to do i didn't realize

you and mr buffkin were not aware of the law to be clear i reached out to christine and when i

did not hear back from her i shared the results with mr buffkin doing a phone call if you have

difficulty obtaining it pursuant to the statute let me know and i will assist sign uh angel sent

from my iPhone and so so you you can see this change here about this autopsy report

that dr roger mitchell asked for two when he visited and so mr attorney smith responds

dear attorney McIlrath we are aware that the law provides a means to request the autopsy report

and mandates that a copy be provided to the family or a legal representative

obtaining it still requires a process however particularly in this case

i suspect that many members of the public may have submitted the state's request form

claiming to be council of record in an effort to obtain nolan's autopsy report from the state

of Mississippi on September 8th christine wells wisely his mother christine wells wisely submitted

a request using the state medical examiner's form i remember attorney part helping her to fill that

form out two weeks later she has received neither the report nor an acknowledgement that her request

was received when my office contacted the state medical examiner's office the receptionist advised

that a state issued subpoena would be necessary given the family's desire to review the report

and your office possession of a copy i thought a direct request to you would be the most

expedient way to obtain it also in light of your public comments regarding transparency

i thought you might be willing to provide the family with a copy as a courtesy we have already

begun the process of obtaining the report and would appreciate any assistance you could provide

in securing a copy for the family cordially Ahmad R Smith Esquire Mr. Smith i've been advised that

the request made did not include proof of next of kin as required for that reason the request cannot

be fulfilled by dps without all necessary information in light of this and as i had not

been made aware of this issue i've asked my staff to send you our copy of the report please confirm

that it is to be sent to you at this email address if it is to be sent to miss

wisely directly please provide her email address i hope this was helpful so we thank the district

attorney for providing us with the autopsy report issued by the jackson county medic examiner

in the state of mississippi and at this time we're going to release that report to you all in the

public attorney Liza Park is going to go over that report at this time we hope to have dr roger

mitchell have both of the autopsies next week to be able to go through those reports as a medical

expert so just to explain what mr kant just read out was from last night and around 6 30

eastern time is when we received this medical examiner's autopsy report uh it's about

three pages um much shorter than the independent autopsy but there are some things of note that

we just want to go ahead and share with the media evidence of injury two dark red purple

subcutaneous scalp contusions over lie the superior nuchal line area of the posterior skull

each measures approximately two inches now we talked about this two days ago in our press

conference um but we didn't have this report then what it also says is that in the neck

the larynx and hyoid bone are without hemorrhages or fractures the interior cervical spine is

unremarkable lungs no fluid or debris is within the airways gi track unremarkable the stomach is

empty 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 and yet the grand jury if you read through that especially at the

end what they want to determine is an accidental drowning but this is their own medical examiner's

report it is signed august 17th is the date that it signed and it still even this medical examiner

concluded that the death was undetermined what we noticed as well even though the medical examiner

did not take a photograph of the contusions she drew a picture and this is what the contusions

look like to her on the back of the head right here on the lower back of the head you've already

seen dr mitchell's diagram of where the red tissue was exactly the same place but on the interior

muscle underneath the skin and that he had determined it was blood these even on her diagram

seemed very significant i mean two inches and link two inches in width we are still trying to determine

who or what caused the blunt force trauma to the back of Nolan Wells head additionally uh we want to

again explain that what dr mitchell found was that there was no white blood cells and what that

means is that this injury this bleeding happened within a short period of time

from the time that the body expired so there's just a window of time before white blood cells

start to become developed so we want everybody to keep this in mind and look at this through

the eyes of the evidence through the eyes of what science can tell us and because of that we do want

to present dr mitchell himself um we are expecting next week trying to coordinate with his schedule

because he is the medical expert one of the best in the country and he's going to do a better job

than us attorneys trying to explain medical things but we anybody a child can understand bruises

are an injury internal bleeding is serious and with that we hope that you all are able to join

us again next week when we're able to unfold this in um a manner where dr mitchell can join us

thank you thank you very much attorney park so with the extraction of the phone and the

revelation of the snaps and the chats in the friend groups you see that this uh this mystery

still needs to be investigated we simply cannot close the chapter and say

wash our hands of it put a ball on it and say nothing to see here would any parent

would any parent white black brown or red would any parent accept those findings of the grand jury

and say thank you case over no parent would do that so why are they asking christine and elmore

wansley to do that don't know what happened to nolan wells we're not accusing anybody

of anything nefarious even with the phone extraction we mr garrett said he doesn't know

the intent of any of that stuff but what we are saying if you care anything about nolan wells

if you know anything come forward if you care anything about nolan wells let's focus on what

killed nolan wells let's don't focus on the distractions it is beneath our shared humanity

it is beneath our shared humanity everybody loves their children we love our children too

and if it was the governor the district attorney i have no doubt no doubt they would be doing

exactly what we are doing and don't attack people for not accepting the grand jury

decision we're in america we still have the first amendment i mean

america we've just done it recently with lindsey clancy's trial several people across the country

didn't agree with the verdict and they expressed that i mean historically when you think about

the oj simpson trial people expressed that they disagreed with it so why are supporters of nolan

wells been attacked because they disagree with the grand jury's decision this is america

we can disagree and still not be disagreeable we can accept facts we can accept evidence

we can apply common sense and we can have a robust discussion debate if you will

about what really happened to nolan wells and all still respect the humanity of nolan

xavier wells and his family because if it was your family i promise you

we will be doing the same thing for you with that we will answer your questions if you have any

from media

it appears that it was stayed on the boat the entire time but it appears nolan was

on and off the boat because it required his face to unlock it so he had gone back on yes

correct yeah

you know apply your common sense this dr mitchell raised these issues

and then apparently this witness came and said what he said

uh but look at what he said he said he awkwardly fell into the water he didn't say anything about

he saw him hit anything and he said afterwards nolan just kept socializing as if he was fine

man if i got two

contusions in the back of my head two inches wide two inches long i'm not going to be talking about

my head i'm not going to be having my head on my the back of my hand on the back of my head

where everybody out there on horn island could see nolan's grabbing his head now there's no

testimony of that apply your common sense apply your common sense this is blunt force trauma

to the back of the head i mean when you barely bump your hand it causes you to be dazed can you

imagine impact that causes two inch length two inch width contusions bleeding it's significant

it's significant it can't be just simply discounted we have reasonably believe that

this could be a factor a significant factor into what happened to nolan wells and how he ended up

unalived well we we acknowledge those there and we would leave it at that but it was just

significant to note that even his friends group and snapchat was talking about people on horn

island as racist they can be racist so that's them having that conversation on july 5th

so then to say oh we're making it about race yeah it's a distraction it's all a distraction

what matters what really matters is what happened to this 18 year old college student

any other questions yes ma'am well what we're going to do is have our medical expert

opine to that and we're going to give all the evidence people can draw their own conclusions

no no but what they all both agree there was evidence of injury to the back of his head

and every medical official every medical expert the state of mississippi

medical examiner and dr mitchell who was the former chief medical examiner of washington dc

they both agree that the manner and cause of death is undetermined and so we're not going to

simply just let them say what the sheriff said on day one it's accidental drowning no foul play

nothing to see here would you accept that if that was your child uh any last questions yes

yes dr turner is the medical examiner and we're going to release it to you also everybody if you

go to press at bencrump.com or go to our social media we will have the autopsies uh placed on

those uh platforms last question okay yes are turning curves who's leading my

thank you for the question but the real question is why has this investigation not answered these

questions were investigated to look into these questions that we are presenting to you today

the real question is if you look at the grand jury bill it says july 14th uh

It says 14th through 18th, that's four days.

You have to first give them instructions, then you have that to end, September 14th, thank you.

Then you have to, after they get some witnesses, and if you look at all the witnesses, not many showed up.

And then you have to give them instructions again, then you have to write out the bill.

And the next question is, who wrote that bill?

Who physically wrote that bill, or no bill?

I think everybody should ask themselves that, and when you ask yourself that, I think a lot of enlightenment will come.

Thank you all.

Mr. Garrett said if you all are interested,

you all can come upstairs to the facility and see where they did a lot of the work on this case.

They will keep it open for one hour for you all if you so desire.

And I want to again thank you and your entire staff for the hard work,

the tireless work, for helping the family get answers, and helping all of us get answers.

Thank you, we'll keep you informed.

We hope that Dr. Roger Mitchell can come and

present to the media on next Thursday in Atlanta, Georgia.

We'll keep you updated, press at bencrump.com, can answer your inquiries.

We'll try to get the medical examiner's report up on social media,

add attorney crump on IG and Facebook and TikTok and all platforms.

Thank you all.

Thank you.

For you that are still here, we're going to be open for an hour.

It's suite 210.

We ask if the hallway's full, coming in, give it a minute.

People can cycle through the forensic laboratory if you want to see some of the equipment that's used

and all the big computers, Lincoln and all that stuff, come on up.

Yes, when you come up, I have a team.

Hey, who's got the thumb drives?

He's got some.

I don't know if we have enough for everybody, so please share and copy.

It's not that large.

Thank you.