No.Nonsense.

On July 4th, Nolan Wells went with a group of his friends to Horn Island off the coast of Mississippi to celebrate the holiday. They spent the day on the beach, in the water, hanging out with the hundreds of kids who were also celebrating on the island.

At about 4:30, the boat he had come on left with his friends after they had an issue with the bilge pump and were taking on water. Nolan chose to stay.

He never made it home.

Two days later, his body was found lying on the beach of Horn Island.

So what happened in the time between when his friends left and when his body was found? We don’t know.

What we do know is that the family has engaged attorney Ben Crump and Al Sharpton to speak for them. Both men have a history of injecting racial motivations without having all of the facts. Jesse Jackson Jr spoke out publicly saying that there had been no investigation and that authorities were engaging in a cover-up similar to the one that occurred with the lynching of Emmitt Till in the 1960s, also in Mississippi. Emmitt was black and was lynched by white men because he looked at a white woman. The men were never brought to justice.

Nolan Wells was black. The friends with whom he went to that island were white.

No one who knows all the kids involved has disputed they had been friends for years. Yet because of the color of their skin, there has automatically been a nefarious story added to a death that, to this point, has shown no indication of foul play.

Even Crump’s independent autopsy showed manner of death as inconclusive.

There was a question from Nolan’s parents as to why there were no pictures from the island. One of the friends gave a reasonable explanation that they were in and out of the ocean and would regularly leave their phones on the boats.

As a mother of a son who is half black, I would burn it all down to know what happened to my son. But to inject a racial component when there is no evidence that one exists is a dangerous game to play.

The boys who were with Nolan are now receiving death threats because of the racial rhetoric.

I have listened to hours of legal explanation regarding this case over the past week and while we still have so many questions, what we don’t have is evidence that a crime occurred. Every indication is that every one of his friends are fully cooperating in the investigation so we need to let it play out before we assign motives and render judgments.

This morning, I was listening to former Orange County prosecutor Matt Murphy. He said that though righting the wrongs of past injustices is a noble endeavor, when you look for monsters around every corner then you become the monster. He further said that assigning a reward to a conviction in a case that may have no criminal component opens the door for “witnesses” to change their stories. This phenomenon could easily lead to wrongful convictions.

It is essential that we refrain from making snap judgments based on our own lived experiences, instead waiting for the evidence to bear out the truth of the case. Just because Nolan was black in a group of white friends doesn’t mean that his death was racially motivated. Furthermore, just because his death occurred in the state of Mississippi does not indicate that racism was a factor. This is not the 1960s and he is not Emmitt Till. Don’t be so focused on looking for the monsters in the story that you become the monster yourself.