Christine Wonsley, the mother of Nolan Wells, has mobilized her legal team to issue subpoenas to a range of leading social media and tech companies. This legal maneuver aims to access records from her late son’s accounts, as questions persist concerning the circumstances of the 18-year-old’s demise, according to court documents.
Documents filed in Mississippi State Chancery Court, which came into the possession of ABC News last week, highlight an effort to obtain data from various platforms. These include Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—all Meta-owned—as well as Snapchat, TikTok, and Life360, an app for family safety and GPS tracking.
The petitioners desire access to the interactions on Wells’ accounts—messages, photos, and videos—and seek the GPS data location coupled with timestamps. This information could be vital for the family as they search for clarity regarding his death.
Per the court order, these tech giants are given 21 days from receiving the subpoenas to allow inspection and duplication of the designated documents, records, and electronically stored information. These materials are to be sent or made available to Christine Wonsley’s legal representatives.
Efforts by ABC News to procure comments from the contacted companies have not yet yielded any responses.
Wells, who played football at Southwest Mississippi Community College, went missing during a Fourth of July celebration with high school friends on Horn Island, a popular undeveloped island just south of Ocean Springs, Mississippi, officials said.
The 18-year-old’s body was recovered on July 6. Authorities said they suspect Wells drowned, but are still investigating.
The subpoenas come after Wonsley alleged in an interview with ABC News’ Good Morning America on July 10 that his family tracked his phone, but when she went to pick it up from Wells’ friends, she said it appeared that some texts and SnapChat messages had been deleted.
It is unclear who had Wells’ phone in the days between July 4 and July 10.
“When we finally got his phone, me and my sister went through the phone. We went in his Snapchat. He had two accounts. Absolutely nothing,” Christine Wonsley said. “It wasn’t even 24 hours, which is how long videos and pictures stay in Snapchat … even my sister was like ‘Yeah, that’s suspicious.'”
Jackson County Sheriff John Ledbetter said there was no initial indication of a crime, but he stressed that investigators were “working diligently to determine exactly what occurred.”
Ledbetter also said the sheriff’s office welcomed the family’s independent investigation.
The official autopsy report from the state Medical Examiner’s Office and the toxicology tests are still pending. A private autopsy commissioned by Wells’ family preliminarily ruled his cause and manner of death as “undetermined pending investigation.”
“This has been a difficult journey. Losing a child, it truly breaks your heart. It is a pain that is just you can’t measure it. Especially someone like Nolan, who brought so much joy and light and life to everyone,” Wonsley said during a press conference on July 22.
“You don’t find too many genuine people like him. So to lose that light at such a young age, under these circumstances, has been absolutely difficult. Which is why we’ve gone this route. There’s so many people out in the public asking all of these questions, but the only question that we have is what happened to our son,” she added.
ABC News’ Jeana Fermi and Emily Shapiro contributed to this report.
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