Nolan Wells' friend Warren Hudson’s family getting ‘threatening and harassing phone calls’ after GiveSendGo launched
Journalist Sarah Fields has revealed that Nolan Wells’ “best friend” Warren Hudson’s family and attorney “have been inundated with threatening and harassing phone calls to both their homes and workplaces” after a GiveSendGo was launched to help Wells’ “targeted friends.” Wells, an Ocean Springs, Mississippi teen, was found dead in the water on the northwest end of Horn Island on Monday morning, July 6. Wells went missing on July 4 after taking a boat to the island with friends. The search for the teen was called off after a body was found by a park ranger on Monday, July 6.
Netizens have allegedly been harassing Wells’ friends who were with him on Horn Island before he died, accusing them of being responsible for his death.
“They shared several of the voicemails with me, and I’m posting just a couple of examples so people can see what they have been dealing with,” Fields wrote.
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“Too many Americans are fed up with people using tragedy to target others with false accusations and harassment. These families have endured relentless attacks, threats, and defamatory claims, despite not being charged with ANY crime. They have decided they are no longer willing to sit back and accept it,” she added.
Fields shared screenshots of a transcription where someone questioned how “the father of somebody who murdered another person” can ask for donations,” and called the family “evil.”
GiveSendGo for Nolan Wells’ friends
A GiveSendGo was launched by Husdon’s family to help his friends who are allegedly being targeted by “race baiters.”
“Since Nolan’s death, Warren Hudson, Jax Pitalo, Morgan Seymour, and many others have been inundated with death threats, threats of violence, and defamation. They have been falsely and wrongly blamed by individuals online and in the media of either directly or indirectly having a hand in Nolan’s death. Most of them could not even attend their own best friend’s funeral,” the page reads.
The page accused Al Sharpton, Ben Crump, and others of continuing to “invent and spread false narratives and lies with no accountability.”
Hudson, who was on Horn Island with Wells before he died, told Brandon Tatum, a YouTuber and former police officer, in an interview that they were dealing with a boat emergency and Wells willingly stayed behind with a girl he was with.
Hudson explained that there were issues with the boat and that the “bilge wouldn’t pump.”
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“So the bilge is basically a pump that releases water from your boat when water comes in. So I opened the back hatch and there’s water up to the batteries. And that is obviously not good,” recalled Hudson.
“There’s water almost coming over the transom, which is where your motors sit and which is by the stern, in the back part of the boat. So obviously we were in an emergency. We’re trying to save the boat,” he continued.
“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. And the girl is a witness to that too,” he added.
Tracetin Shepherd, Wells’ friend, previously told ABC and Rolling Stone that he and his friends were getting death threats amid the investigation. One friend even accused attorney Crump of preying on Wells’ parents at a difficult time.
Shepherd and Jayvon Williams, two of Wells’ Black friends, told the media that people need to stop making his death about race.
While comments on the case are not directly split along racial lines, many have begun talking about Mississippi’s long history of racial injustice and Black deaths caused by lynching.
An independent autopsy commissioned by Wells’ family was inconclusive, Ben Crump previously announced. The autopsy found the teen’s cause and manner of death to be “undetermined” pending further investigation.