As the search for answers continues in the Nolan Wells death case, after the 18-year-old went missing from a boat trip with friends on the Fourth of July and was later discovered dead, The View host Whoopi Goldberg had a pointed message to share with investigators on Tuesday’s (July 14) episode.
After the other panelists dissected the twists and turns in the case, including the conflicting information shared by the other boys who were present with Wells the day that he disappeared and died, Goldberg weighed in.
“You don’t want to jump to race,” Goldberg said. “But Mississippi doesn’t have the best reputation, and so we want to make sure that the officers that are there know that we are expecting them to do their job. Unlike years ago when they didn’t, this is 2026. So we are expecting your best work to find out what happened to this young man.”
Previously, Sunny Hostin also indicated that there are questions of race, saying, “I think what’s very important is that Ben Crump has been retained by the family and is conducting an independent investigation… Because this happened in Mississippi, there are some racial undertones to this. He was the only Black kid on an island full of kids that were white, and his family is saying… he would have just never stayed on the island and been left behind by his friends. His family also said that this kid, Tracestin Shepherd, they don’t know him.”
After then rolling tape of Wells’ family saying they didn’t know the kid, who’d described himself as one of Wells’ best friends, Hostin continued, “It’s just so confusing because it seemed there were three boys with him that were good friends with him. … They turned off their social media accounts. They say that they have cooperated with the police, but they kept his phone and didn’t give it to his parents.”
Alyssa Farah Griffin then added, “We’re still waiting on the autopsy results, and this is not currently being investigated as a homicide. But there’s a lot of reason, I think, to suspect foul play because this is when they say he was left on an island. This isn’t like Grand Cayman. This is literally like a sandbar. There’s no running water. Nobody would willingly stay back without a cell phone, not knowing if they had a way to get back. And the reports were that he stayed back with a girl that he met and was flirting with, but she then told police that he didn’t. She thought he was going back with his friends. There’s all these like, ‘he said, she said,’ and I want to be careful of one thing because I think there’s a little bit of a jump to implicate the friends he was with on the boat because they went back. We don’t know anything yet, but there were also a lot of other young people on this island. A lot of other young people docked up and drinking. So there are also people we may have not heard of, who potentially could have been involved if God forbid, something wrong was done. Either way, I want peace and justice.”
Sara Haines then jumped in to say, “The phone was found because the mom did the Life 360 and traced it to one of the friend’s houses. The thing that shocks me is, whoever parts with their phone. Yeah, this is a young person…. His mom was saying that there’s just there’s no Snapchat. It was more common for her son to have documented certain things. The phone wasn’t in his possession, and things seemed to be gone off the phone. That does raise some suspicion.”
Hostin agreed, saying, “Those kids said that they didn’t have his phone at first, and because his mother tracked the phone through her Life 360 app, they then turned it over to someone else’s to one of her friends. Yeah. So if if you if you come back with someone else’s phone and you know that they’re missing, why would you not call the parents immediately?”
“Why wouldn’t you call as soon as you knew he wasn’t there?” Goldberg added. “If he’s the only Black kid, you know he’s missing!”
The View, weekdays, 11a/10c, ABC