There is no playbook for how a mother grieving the death of her child, under unknown circumstances, should seek justice. For a Black mother whose 18-year-old son didn’t come home after a Fourth of July boating trip with his white friends, in a state with a history of disregard for Black lives, the search for answers carries added weight. Hardly a week after Christine Wells-Wonsley learned that her son, Nolan Wells, was found dead on Horn Island, on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, she traveled to New York City to speak to anyone who would listen. “This is not how I wanted the world to meet my son, but here we are,” she said during a news conference on July 10, flanked by her husband, Elmore, and a group of civil-rights leaders.

That same day, with prominent civil-rights attorney Benjamin Crump by their side, the family spoke to Good Morning America’s Michael Strahan, demanding the only thing available after such a tragedy. “We just want honesty and transparency,” Wells-Wonsley said. “We want a thorough investigation. We want that same respect that would be given to anybody else, and that’s it. We just want answers.”

Nearly two months later, official sources haven’t provided many — other than Wells was found dead on the west end of the island, as if his body had washed ashore, and that a state autopsy has been completed but remains sealed pending the results of the investigation, which authorities are presenting to a grand jury. The family conducted its own, inconclusive autopsy. The lead prosecutor investigating the circumstances surrounding Wells’s death, Jackson County district attorney Angel Myers McIlrath, hasn’t tipped her hand as to the direction of the probe with no indication that she’s treating it as a likely homicide. The Trump administration, which should have an interest in the matter because Horn Island is within the jurisdiction of the National Park Service and the U.S. Coast Guard, appears but a nonentity. And sustained, mainstream, or cable news coverage of what happened to Wells has died down, other than occasional spurts — such as when the office of the general counsel at the NAACP, the nation’s oldest civil-rights organization, joined the Wells family’s legal team to provide “additional investigative and legal resources” and “ensure that no stone is left unturned.”

In this vacuum, and a national news cycle where ongoing megatrials and the raft of illegalities perpetrated from Washington suck up all the airtime, a cadre of Black journalists, true-crime obsessives, and TikTok........

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