A newly surfaced Nolan Wells audio recording captures the moment a routine help call turned into a sinking emergency. In the recording, a caller says the boat is taking on water because the bilge pump is not working and asks to be "unsank" and towed back to shore.
The recording is being searched now because it puts a raw, time-stamped emergency into the middle of a death case that has stayed in dispute. Nolan Wells was 18 when he died, and his body was found washed up on the shoreline two days after he and his friends returned to the mainland without him.
What stands out in the call is how confused the exchange became even as the boat was going down. The caller could not give coherent membership details when asked, and the dispatcher had to work through the GPS coordinates before asking how many people were on board. The answer was that there were no children and no one over the age of 21.
That panic matters because the Sea Tow captain later said he had already called Jerry Adkerson, while Adkerson said the situation had been handled. The recording suggests something far less settled: a caller struggling to explain what was happening as the boat took on water, and an emergency response that did not match the calm version offered afterward.
Nolan Wells and his friends had been partying at Horn Island on July 4 before the boat trouble unfolded. Mississippi officials have suggested that Wells drowned, but his family and lawyer Ben Crump continue to question that conclusion, and the family has had an independent autopsy done. The unresolved question now is not whether the call happened — the audio shows that it did — but why Wells was left behind when the others came back to shore without him.
That gap is what keeps this case open. The newly surfaced recording adds a concrete moment to the timeline, but it does not explain the split between the emergency call, the return to the mainland, and the finding of Wells’s body two days later.
