Nolan Wells' friends took his phone when they left Horn Island. When his family finally got it back, messages had already been deleted. Nolan was eighteen, a wide receiver at Southwest Mississippi Community College from Ocean Springs, Mississippi. A boat left a dock outside Ocean Springs at 9:56 on the morning of the Fourth of July, and the group reached Horn Island by 11:14. Nolan was last seen there around three that afternoon. Roughly ninety minutes later, the boat's operator called a towing company to report the boat was taking on water. Nobody has publicly explained what happened in between. The boat left the island at 4:31, passed Fort Bayou near 5:52, reached a dock at 6:06, and was pulled from the water at a launch by 7:19. A National Park Service ranger recovered Nolan's body at 8:45 Monday morning, off the island's northwestern tip, in a patch of water that had turned up nothing during Sunday's search. Attorney Ben Crump says the deleted messages came from a phone his friends had control of after he was left behind. Crump's experts and Jackson County investigators have since agreed to examine the device together, though what they'll find in messages already erased is anyone's guess. There's also a phone left on the dashboard with two different explanations, an empty photo roll with two different explanations, and a video that circulated widely with two different accounts of how it got there. The family has since arranged its own independent autopsy in Washington, D.C., separate from the one done by the Mississippi State Medical Examiner's Office. Neither result has been made public. No agency has released a cause or manner of death. District Attorney Angel Myers McIlrath says the case is heading to a grand jury once the investigation wraps. Whatever those deleted messages said, somebody decided the family shouldn't get to read them first.