JACKSON COUNTY, Miss. (WLOX) — WLOX News has obtained audio from the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources (MDMR) related to the Nolan Wells case.
The recording is of a call made from a teen on a boat on Horn Island on July 4 around 4 p.m. to a private towing company, Sea Tow.
Wells traveled out on that boat with friends for the holiday, but he did not return with them. He was reported missing that night, and his body was found just off the island two days later.
At the beginning of the recording, there is commotion in the background as hold music plays. Then, the Sea Tow dispatcher picks up the phone.
In the call, the teen can be heard saying, “Hey we’re at the west tip of Horn, and our bilge pump stopped working. We’re sinking. Can y’all please come?”
The dispatcher asks how far the water is coming up in the boat, and the teen replies, “It’s coming up… we’re just sinking. I don’t know. We’re going down though.”
The dispatcher then said, “And is everyone on board and in good health otherwise?”
The caller responded, “Yeah, yeah, everyone is on board.”
The teen gives the dispatcher the boat’s GPS coordinates, which were just off the northwest tip of Horn Island.
“What do you want to do? Do you want to be towed back?” the dispatcher asked.
“I want to get this boat unsank and towed back, yes,” the teen said. He asked for the boat to be towed to Fort Bayou launch.
The teen said there were about seven people on board the boat.
The dispatcher then spoke with a captain, who said he was already on the phone with a man who owned the boat— a relative of the teen who called.
“It sounds like a bunch of kids on board on Horn Island,” the dispatcher told the captain. “He’s saying the boat is sinking and he’s on Horn Island… It’s just unfortunate, he’s just a kid… there’s a lot going on… I’m guessing they’re all under 18… He wants you guys to go out there and un-pump the boat and then tow it in?”
The captain said while on the phone, the owner of the boat told him that the teens didn’t “need any help right now, but if something changes, he’ll call me back.”
The dispatcher then tried to transfer the teen to the captain, but the call appears to have disconnected.
Ultimately, Sea Tow says it did not end up towing the boat. Sea Tow said, in a statement released to NBC News, “Before assistance was rendered, the vessel owner advised that Sea Tow was no longer needed because help had already been obtained. Sea Tow’s involvement concluded at that point.”
In the call, the teen can be heard talking to the owner of another boat, identified by MDMR reports as a 21-year-old, asking him to “jump in and pull the plug… while you’re going.”
Nolan’s friend, Warren Hudson, said on a podcast that he didn’t go out to the island on the same boat Nolan did that day, but he had a couple of conversations with him while there.
Hudson said he ended up going back to land with friends on the boat that began to sink, and that the friend in the audio recording did help them when their boat was experiencing issues.
In the same podcast episode, Hudson also said that Nolan chose to stay behind after the boat he and others were on started to take in water.
“Obviously we were in an emergency,” Hudson said. “The boat… We were trying to save the boat. It’s not like we didn’t ask Nolan or we just left Nolan. Nolan decided to stay on the island with the girl that he was with.”
However, in a July 10 press conference, Nolan’s parents, Christine and Elmore Wonsley, said they do not believe Nolan would have voluntarily separated from his group.
“We always taught him if you go with a group, you stay with the group,” Elmore Wonsley said. “If you go with five, you come back with five. Do not separate from the group. He always said yes, sir. So he knew to stay with his group.”
The investigation into 18-year-old Nolan Wells’ death is ongoing, according to the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office.
In an independent autopsy commissioned by Wells’ family, his cause and manner of death were ruled “undetermined pending investigation.” Results of the initial autopsy, conducted by the Mississippi state medical examiner on July 7, will not be released until after a grand jury reviews all evidence in the case.
Here’s what we know about the timeline of events leading up to Wells’ death and the days that followed.
See a spelling or grammar error in this story? Report it to our team HERE.
Copyright 2026 WLOX. All rights reserved.
