The records support the timeline previously described by some people who saw Wells that day — but don’t indicate where the teen was during his mysterious final hours
Newly released records show the movements of the boat that carried Nolan Wells to Horn Island, Miss., on July 4 before the 18-year-old disappeared and later died in a case that has attracted national attention.
While much remains publicly unknown about Wells’ final hours, amid both a sheriff’s investigation and his family’s own probe, the boat records align with what some friends who saw Wells that day have already said.
Wells traveled to the island by boat with friends for an Independence Day party but did not return with them.
That evening, his mother reported him missing after hearing from one of his friends and multiple agencies launched a search on July 5. His body was recovered in the water at the island on July 6.
Wells’ cause of dєatᩚh has not been confirmed and the results of an official and independent autopsy are pending.
There have been conflicting accounts about whether Wells chose to remain on Horn Island. His friends told authorities that he did and that he had met a girl there.
But Wells’ parents, Christine and Elmore Wonsley, have said it would have been out of character and reckless for their son to separate from the group. Elmore has called that account a lie.
Wells was last seen on the island around 3 p.m. local time on July 4, according to authorities.
On July 7, Ashlee Cole, a local chancery judge, whose son Warren was with Wells that day, released a lengthy statement saying Warren last saw Wells around 3 p.m.
According to Cole, Warren left about 4:30 p.m. because the boat he was on began taking on water and experiencing problems with its bilge pump. She said her son was interviewed by the sheriff’s department and cooperated fully with investigators.
Another of Wells’ friends who was on the island that day, Tracestin Shepherd, told ABC News that a group left the island on the boat because of an electrical problem but that Wells remained after meeting a young woman.
Records obtained by NBC News support the timeline about the boat leaving, indicating the boat’s operator called dispatch around 4 p.m. to request assistance. The records, however, do not confirm everyone who traveled on the boat or provide further information about Wells’ whereabouts around that time.
“Hey, we’re at the west tip of Horn and our bilge pump stopped working,” the caller says in the audio, per NBC. “We’re going. We’re sinking. Can you all please come?”
The caller reported there were “like seven” people on board, adding, “I want to get this boat unsank and towed back.”
Separately, GPS data obtained by CBS News from the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources shows the vessel left a dock shortly before 10 a.m. and arrived at Horn Island at 11:14 a.m, where it remained until 4:31 p.m. (Wells’ family has said he stayed with friends the night before, ahead of going to the party that day.)
According to the GPS data, the boat left the island at 4:31 p.m. and returned to its original departure dock.
It then traveled into Fort Bayou around 5:52 p.m. before returning to the dock at 6:06 p.m., CBS reported.
The boat traveled back to the Fort Bayou boat launch at 7:19 p.m., according to the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources’ report. It later traveled over land to the nearby Biloxi residence of the boat’s owners.
Wells’ parents have retained civil rights attorney Ben Crump and together they have sharply questioned the investigation so far — calling for thoroughness and transparency and suggesting race is a factor — while saying they don’t believe Wells accidentally drowned, as authorities have said is possible.
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“We always taught him that if you go with a group, you stay with a group,” dad Elmore said on Good Morning America. “If you go with five, you come back with five. Do not separate from the group. Because I always said, ‘Safety is in numbers.’ So he knew to stay with this group, so why would he split from the group? I don’t know.”
The family has also questioned why Wells’ friends would leave without him while taking his keys and phone, which his parents later retrieved after he was reported missing. (One of Wells’ friends said he left his phone to protect it from the ocean.)
Jackson County Sheriff John Ledbetter has said his investigation remains active, and both he and Wells’ family have asked anyone with firsthand information to come forward.
💔 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.
