When the Victim Can No Longer Speak, We Have To

Unanswered questions have consequences that can last for generations.

Over the past few weeks, many people, including me, have been asking questions about what happened to Nolan Wells, a Black 18-year-old Mississippian who died after attending a boat party with two white friends. Some people have criticized continued questioning as sensationalism. Others have insisted that the public should let investigators do their job. I disagree. Not because I think we should become sanctioned community investigators, replacing real ones, but because I know what can happen when people stop asking questions too soon.

Victims of suspicious deaths not only lose their lives but also their voices. When the victim cannot speak, investigators must reconstruct the story entirely from physical evidence, witness accounts, and forensic findings. That reconstruction is difficult, and if important questions go unasked or evidence goes unexplored, the victim has no opportunity to correct the record. Public scrutiny helps ensure someone continues asking questions on their behalf until they have fully answered those questions. So, though those of us who keep asking questions amid the murder investigations get criticized, it’s exactly that type of attention that’s likely to ensure the investigation is thorough.

I don’t have to wonder whether public scrutiny matters in a murder investigation because I’ve lived through one. My son, Prince, was found dead in a bathtub at his father’s house. The initial explanation was that he died from a seizure. But the public rallied for Prince and kept asking questions. Reporters called the police department and the district attorney’s office. The case stayed in the public eye, and investigators continued digging beyond that initial explanation.

My son’s father was ultimately convicted of murdering him. What stays with me, though, is this: two other people died around him before Prince, and authorities didn’t charge one of those deaths until after the public attention surrounding my son’s murder. I cannot help but to wonder what would’ve happened had the two previous deaths gotten the same level of attention that my son’s case did. Perhaps a killer would’ve been taken off the streets well before he had the chance to murder an innocent child.

Police investigators are human. They want to close cases, but resources are limited, and multiple cases are competing within one department for attention. Public scrutiny can be the factor that gets a case the attention it needs to ensure a thorough investigation, and it can also encourage witnesses to come forward after seeing coverage. It’s not uncommon for a department to devote more resources when a case becomes highly visible, or to investigate questions the public is raising that might not have initially gotten enough attention.

One example of where public attention led to a deeper investigation was in the Ahmaud Arbery case. Arbery was a 25-year-old Black man from Georgia who was killed while jogging in February 2020. Though initially no arrests were made, the release of video footage that showed his fatal shooting drew attention to issues of racial profiling, vigilantism, and accountability. The case garnered considerable public attention, which sped up the investigation and the subsequent arrests.

One of the most notable historical examples of this is in the case of Emmett Till. The open-casket funeral and the media coverage that surrounded the case transformed a local murder into a national story. Though the killers were acquitted, decades of continued public attention led to renewed investigations and a broader reckoning with race motivated violence. The shadow of the Emmett Till murder still stretches across Mississippi, reminding us that unanswered questions have consequences that can last for generations.

Jackson County Sheriff John Ledbetter told the media the day after Wells’ body was discovered that “no foul play was suspected.” This came before the independent autopsy, which listed the cause of death as “undetermined” and did not rule out non-accidental factors. The case remains classified as an active death investigation. Add to that a crime scene where, despite a holiday crowd on the island where the teenagers were celebrating, no one reported seeing Wells get separated from his group, and the accounts from the boys he was with reportedly contain contradictions about why he stayed behind. We should not draw parallels to Till based on demographics alone, but there are parallels in the early dismissal, the incomplete story, and the community pushback that followed. And it means that when a young Black man dies and questions remain unanswered, we must continue asking them.

Nolan Wells deserves the advocacy he’s receiving from the public. Many public murder cases, including my own son’s, have taught us that people asking questions shouldn’t be dismissed as interfering. And though we don’t know what happened to Nolan, and sadly may never know, insisting on a thorough investigation isn’t accusing someone of murder.

No profession performs at its best without accountability — not journalists, not politicians, not corporations, and not law enforcement. Public scrutiny isn’t an attack on investigators. It’s one of the most important mechanisms that helps ensure tough questions continue to be asked until investigators find the answers.

The public plays an important role in ensuring suspicious deaths receive the thorough investigations they deserve. If answers exist in the Nolan Wells case, his family deserves them. And until we know the truth, we must keep pressing authorities to continue to investigate — because Nolan, and others like him, cannot.

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