After an African American teenager was found dead in Mississippi on Monday, his family hired prominent civil rights attorney Ben Crump to seek answers about the circumstances surrounding his death. Crump has a history of quickly framing similar cases in racial terms, and this case is likely to be no different.
Mississippi teen and college football player Nolan Wells went missing on Saturday, the Fourth of July, while on a trip to the nearby Horn Island with a group of boys. Within hours of returning to Ocean Springs, a coastal town of about 18,000 people, one of the boys reported him missing to the Coast Guard. On Monday, July 6, a U.S. park ranger found Wells’s body on Horn Island.
Following the discovery and identification of the teen’s body, the county performed an autopsy in order to determine Wells’s cause of death. The details have yet to be released, but authorities are working under the assumption that the 18-year-old drowned.
Attorney Ben Crump, who represented the families of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Michael Brown in nationally polarizing cases, released a statement Friday saying that his office is taking on the case of Nolan Wells.
“Attorney Crump and the legal team will conduct an independent review of the circumstances of Nolan’s death and will press for the timely release of all records, witness accounts, and autopsy findings,” the statement reads.
Assisting Crump in funding the autopsy, which is going to be conducted in Washington, D.C., rather than Mississippi, is Colin Kaepernick, the former football player remembered for kneeling in protest of the national anthem. Kaepernick runs a nonprofit called the Know Your Rights Camp, where he has funded a number of other independent autopsy reports before.
“His family deserves answers. They deserve the truth,” Crump said. “We will not rest until every fact about what happened to Nolan on Horn Island is brought into the light, and we call on investigators to pursue this case with the urgency and transparency this family deserves.”
Crump is among those beginning to raise questions about the circumstances surrounding Wells’s death. They want to know why Wells was left on the island and whether a reported verbal altercation on the boys’ boat is relevant to the case, even though there is no evidence that Wells was involved in the argument.
The case that Wells was directly or indirectly killed because of his race is largely unsubstantiated, but Crump is promoting the narrative.
Crump told ABC News that the teen’s friends took his phone with them when they left the island and that the family had discovered that messages had been deleted from the device. Wells’s family also said that, since Wells was an athlete who knew how to swim, it was unlikely that he would drown.
Wells’s death is truly tragic. He was a young, up-and-coming athlete at the local community college in Ocean Springs. He was at a party with many friends and others from the area celebrating July Fourth. He died on an island after choosing to stay out there while his friends boated back to shore, according to the town’s sheriff.
Crump’s involvement in this case and his statements about the teen’s death so far attempt to paint a picture of racial injustice, or even lynching, into an already confusing and unfortunate situation. And this is also not the first time that Crump has tried doing something like this.
In September 2025, student Demartravion “Trey” Reed was found dead on the grounds of Delta State University, hanging in a tree. After an investigation, local officials determined the death was by suicide. Many local and national “racial justice” groups claimed that Reed was lynched and the real cause of his death was being covered up.
Crump jumped onto the scene to represent Reed’s family. Just like in Wells’s case, he requested an independent autopsy and investigated the matter himself. While he was investigating, groups like the New Black Panther Party continued to say that “Trey Reed was lynched.”
THE LEFT IS OBSESSED WITH RACE. AMERICA HAS LEFT IT BEHIND
Nearly a year after Reed’s death, Crump has yet to release the independent autopsy report, according to an article by The College Fix. If Wells’s case is anything like Reed’s, it is set up to excite false feelings of racial division while never providing closure.
The deaths of Reed and Wells are very unfortunate. Their families will be dealing with this loss for a long time. But that doesn’t give bad actors the right to swoop in and blame their deaths on racial hatred.