A Horn Island body found Monday morning has not been identified, Jackson County Sheriff John Ledbetter said, after a park ranger discovered it on the northwest end of the island around 8:45 a.m. The finding came during the search for 18-year-old Nolan Xavier Wells, who was last seen Saturday, July 4, around 3 p.m. on Horn Island.
Ledbetter said the search brought together the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department, the Department of Marine Resources, the Gulf Islands National Seashore, the U.S. Coast Guard and the United Cajun Navy. First responders also set up a command post at the Lake Mars Boat Launch in Ocean Springs, a staging point at 1200 Lake Mars Avenue.
Nolan Xavier Wells search
Wells played football at Ocean Springs High School and is a wide receiver at Southwest Mississippi Community College. That connection turned the search into a broad response centered on Horn Island and the waters around it, with multiple agencies working from land and water.
The body’s identity remains the key question for the search. If it is Wells, the discovery would bring an abrupt end to a missing-person effort that had already drawn a coordinated response from county, marine, federal and volunteer crews.
For now, the immediate next step is identification. Until that happens, the finding on Horn Island stands as the latest development in the search and the only one that can change the case from a search effort to a death investigation.
