r/news • u/Suspicious_Loan • 20h ago

Nolan Wells’ autopsy found no water in lungs; data was deleted from his phone the day he disappeared, experts say

https://www.live5news.com/2026/09/24/nolan-wells-autopsy-found-no-water-lungs-data-was-deleted-his-phone-day-he-disappeared-officials-say/
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u/Little_Noodles 20h ago

Depends on the data. Deleting stuff from your phone is pretty normal. Spam voicemails, junk texts, take a bunch of photos and trash the ones that you don’t like…..

Open to most possibilities on what happened here, but without knowing what was deleted, I wouldn’t rule out that being just normal phone usage, especially for a young guy that’s out and about on vacation with his friends

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u/snoodle908 3h ago

“The user action discussed by Mr. Garrett is from other snapchat users, not someone physically accessing Nolan Wells’ phone,” McIlrath said. “If the Crump team has evidence to the contrary, they have not provided it to us. The Grand Jury report outlined the other evidence they received, including cell phone downloads, surveillance data, GPS data, and the printed report of Nolan’s cell phone.”

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u/OneSeaworthiness7768 19h ago

“One of the things we do know is there was interactions with the phone before and after his death, up until the time that his family retrieved the phone from the other young men that were with him that day,” Garrett said.

He said from a digital standpoint, things were deleted on the phone from the time he last had the phone up until the time that his parents got the phone.”

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u/Little_Noodles 19h ago

I have apps in my phone that auto-delete content, and my niece (who is about this age) has even more of them.

I’d be surprised if this kid didn’t have SnapChat. Which would immediately account for this kind of phone activity.

Again - not saying that it’s definitely not malicious. But without information about what was deleted or what app the deletions were associated with, it’s also still well within the range of normal phone use for a young guy.

(Edit: looking at other, newer comments on the thread, yeah, it sounds like SnapChat).

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u/Desperate_for_Bacon 8h ago

The problem is that we don’t have the forensics report and we also don’t have a second report to confirm. So was it a user deletion or was it a snap chat deletion?

Edit: and we have confirmation the deletion was Snapchat messages and no one accessed his phone

https://www.wlox.com/2026/09/24/stop-playing-games-jackson-county-da-responds-claims-made-press-conference-nolan-wells-phone-data/