Mississippi Teen Nolan Wells' Phone Wasn't Tampered With, Family's Expert Says

Andrew Garrett says the deleted Snapchat messages were erased remotely by others in the chats, which the app allows.

Nobody unlocked or used Nolan Wells' phone after the 18-year-old vanished on Horn Island, a barrier island off the Mississippi coast. That's what Andrew Garrett, the digital forensics expert his family hired, now says.

Garrett says the deleted messages he found were Snapchat messages. Other people in those conversations erased them from their end, which the app lets any user do. He explained it in a livestream posted to YouTube on Sept. 27, NewsNation reported.

The Mississippi Free Press reported that Garrett went live twice that week to clarify claims about the deleted messages that had been misinterpreted. Garrett runs Garrett Discovery. He'd stood beside Wells' parents at a Sept. 24 press conference held by Ben Crump, the family's attorney.

"When we say erased from the phone, you've got to be a little careful with that," Garrett said in the Sept. 27 livestream, as quoted by NewsNation. A deleted message, in other words, doesn't mean someone reached into the phone.

Wells grew up in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. He finished Ocean Springs High School in 2025 and played wide receiver at Southwest Mississippi Community College. On July 4, he and a group of friends took a boat out to Horn Island, a remote, federally protected island about 5 miles offshore.

The boat started taking on water, and part of the group headed back to the mainland, the Free Press reported. Wells stayed behind and said he'd get a ride home on another boat. Search teams found his body on the island's shoreline on July 6.

How the case got here

• July 4: Wells goes to Horn Island by boat with friends and goes missing there.
• July 6: Searchers find his body on the shoreline.
• Late September: Jackson County District Attorney Angel McIlrath announces that a grand jury returned no true bill on any criminal charges.
• Sept. 24: Crump holds a press conference with Wells' parents and Garrett.
• Sept. 27: Garrett posts a YouTube livestream saying the phone wasn't tampered with.

The grand jury's report described drowning as a "diagnosis of exclusion," a finding reached by ruling other causes out. Crump has pushed back on that, the Free Press reported. His point is that two autopsies were done, one by the state and one paid for by the family, and neither has named a cause of death.

That leaves the family in an unusual spot. The grand jury declined to charge anyone, and the man the family brought in to examine the phone has said one of the pieces of this case that drew the most attention points to how Snapchat works, not to anyone tampering with the phone.

The question Crump keeps raising is still open. Neither autopsy, the state's or the family's, has said how Nolan Wells died.