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This week the loved ones of Nolan Xavier Wells, the 18-year-old college football player who went missing while partying with friends on the Fourth of July, learned the body authorities found days later was his. Wells was last seen alive on Horn Island, a sliver of undeveloped land that’s roughly 20 miles from the coast of Alabama, 10 miles from Mississippi and less than a mile wide.

In 1978 Congress designated the barrier island a wilderness area and since then, it has become a popular Gulf Coast hangout for young people.

There is no shelter or drinking water.

The only way to reach it is by boat.

According to Sheriff John Ledbetter of Jackson County, Miss., when the group of friends who brought Wells to the island decided to head back to the mainland, Wells stayed behind, telling them he would catch a ride back later. That was at 4:30 p.m. The teenager was reported missing about eight hours later. Now his family and friends are forced to make the unimaginable transition from celebrating the country’s 250th birthday together to saying goodbye to a young soul who had been set to celebrate his 19th in August.

It’s a heartbreaking story.

No parent should have to bury their child.

What makes Wells’ story particularly difficult are the facts. Not the ones specific to this case, mind you. Local authorities do not suspect foul play and said the complete findings from the investigation are likely weeks away. No, the facts that keep me on edge are the historical ones born in the wilderness in places like Mississippi and Alabama.

The autopsy and coroner’s report will reveal the specific facts regarding what happened to Wells on the Fourth of July. Whatever those details turn out to be, they will be shadowed by the fact that the 18-year-old appears to be the only Black person in any of the video footage from that day. This fact may call to mind the 2023 video footage of a group of white men attacking a lone Black man on a dock in Montgomery, Ala. And that footage itself was shadowed by the early-morning recording of a group of white teenagers beating up and intentionally running over a Black man with a pickup truck in 2011 in Jackson, Miss. After that murder — of James Craig........

© Los Angeles Times