A moment that started out as a disagreement between Tracestin Shepherd and his girlfriend has been at the center of a swirl of questions about the tragic death of 18-year-old Mississippi football player Nolan Wells. The video posted to social media of a group of young people seemingly in a heated altercation has been believed to be the last time Wells was pictured or heard on video before his disappearance and death, which has made national news. But Shepherd, a close friend of Wells, says what really happened in the video isn’t how it’s been portrayed.
At around 3:30 p.m. on July 4, Shepherd says he was with a large group of friends from high school, including Wells, to celebrate the holiday. Shepherd and his family took a boat over to Horn Island, a barrier island off the coast of Mississippi, where he planned to meet up with Wells and some other friends from high school — the friends often took the 45-minute ride over to Horn Island on weekends to hang out and had been there since that morning.
Shepherd says he was waist-deep in the water surrounding Horn Island having a disagreement with his girlfriend that afternoon when a young man his age walked by and criticized their conversation. The man was an acquaintance from a nearby town who had not come over on the boat with Shepherd or Wells.
“I told him he needed to mind his own business,” Shepherd, 20, told me Saturday, a week after the disagreement. Shepherd says the exchange became heated, and that he and the other man ended up getting into a physical altercation. Shepherd’s uncle, who had raised him like a father, told Shepherd to get out of the water and onto his boat so they could head back home. Shepherd complied, but once he got on the boat, he changed his mind and decided he wanted to go back. Shepherd’s friends had by that point begun defending him back on shore. Around this time, another adult on a nearby boat started filming the video, later posting it on social media after news of Wells’ disappearance broke.
“In that video, you hear somebody yelling — that is me,” Shepherd says. “It’s me yelling — my exact wording is, ‘Get me off this fucking boat.’ I wanted to fight, and I’d felt like I hadn’t had my fair share.”
Shepherd’s girlfriend says she had gone over to the beach when the altercation moved there, and Shepherd’s uncle says a group of older adults stepped in and broke up the fight between the younger adults on shore. Shepherd’s girlfriend and uncle corroborated his story, as did a family friend who can be seen in the video trying to calm Shepherd down.
“He want[ed] to get off the boat and go fight the dude who he got into it with,” says the family friend, who asked not to be named. “Nobody knows what Tracestin was saying better than me because he was screaming it in my face.”
Once the Wells story began making headlines, the grainy video quickly went viral. People online speculated that Wells was one of the people standing in the group seemingly in a heated discussion — Wells was last seen wearing blue swim trunks, like a young man in the group. Shepherd says the man in the video who people think is Wells is too short to be his six-foot-two-inch friend. He says Wells is not shown in the video at all — that he was just out of frame hanging out in the water. Shepherd has been speaking with law enforcement since Wells went missing and gave his full version of events of that day and of the video to local police officers on Friday, July 10. Shepherd says he has also communicated with Wells’ family.
The video has been at the center of the discussions around Wells’ death, as many believed it was the last time he was seen alive — and showed that he was on the island when the video was taken around 3 p.m. It also seemed to show that Wells was involved in an altercation shortly before his death. Wells was found dead on Monday, July 6, in the same area where the group had been hanging out all day.
Ben Crump, the attorney working with the Wells family, reposted the video after it went viral on social media and brought it up at a Friday afternoon press conference. Crump said that Wells could be heard in the video: “This video, you can hear an argument going where Nolan is saying, ‘Give me my freaking phone, what are you freaking doing?’”
Another friend of Wells and Shepherd told TMZ over the weekend that it wasn’t Wells heard on the video. Jayvon Williams said the video was too far away from him to make out whether or not it was Wells in the group standing on shore. But he thought the audio sounded too clear for it to have come from the land.
“That altercation, it sounds just like my other friend who got into another altercation on the boat,” Jayvon Williams told TMZ about the video. “As he was in that altercation, I was trying to calm him down, they were trying to get him out, off the island, trying to get him back to land because he was just losing it. The parents on that boat were trying to get him out.”
Shepherd confirms to Rolling Stone that he was the friend Williams was referring to in the TMZ interview. “Those were not Nolan’s words, they were mine.”
Crump did not immediately respond to request for comment.
Shepherd remembers Wells as a gentle, respectful person and says he deeply misses his close friend. “He made sure everybody was included in everything and if you were somewhere, he made you feel welcome there,” Shepherd says. “He didn’t see any flaws you had, he only saw the positive you brought into his life, into the world. Whatever you did, if Nolan was friends with you, he was your biggest supporter.”
In his first interview with the media, Shepherd says now that he’s made his full statement to the police, he wants to correct the record, both because he wants the truth out there and because he’s worried about his friends who are receiving death threats after online sleuths have misconstrued what is happening in the video.
“I’m tired of speculation, of not being able to talk, it’s time for somebody to start speaking up,” Shepherd says. “I’m not just hurting because of Nolan, I’m also hurting because I call my friends and you can hear it in their voice that they’re terrified of what these people will do to them. It’s gone completely way too far.”
The Jackson County Sheriff’s Office is investigating Wells’ death, and his family’s attorney, Crump, has called for an independent investigation and is conducting an independent autopsy. Autopsy results are expected soon.
“I get that everybody wants justice for Nolan,” Shepherd says, tears streaming down his face. “Everybody wants to know exactly what happened. Will we ever know?”
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