Brian Trascher, a leader of the United Cajun Navy who helped find Nolan Wells’s body on Horn Island, has challenged claims made by Ben Crump about the circumstances surrounding the case.
Speaking in an interview, Mr Trascher accused Mr Crump’s team of using “selective verbiage” at a press conference last week, saying some details had been presented in a way that made the evidence appear more suspicious than he believed it was.
He highlighted questions about Mr Wells’s phone, including a forensic expert’s correction to the timeline for the last time the device was locked.
Mr Trascher also rejected rumours that Mr Wells’s body had been dumped at the location where it was found. He said a flight over Horn Island on July 6, before the discovery, shaped his view of what may have happened.
According to Mr Trascher, he saw neither a body nor any boats in the area during the flight. He believes Mr Wells later drifted to the spot, where he found the body hours afterwards.
He further addressed claims that messages had been deleted from Mr Wells’s phone. Mr Trascher said members of a Snapchat group chat had deleted their own messages using their own devices, causing them to disappear from Mr Wells’s view as well.
That explanation, he said, did not involve anyone physically accessing Mr Wells’s phone.
Mr Trascher stressed that he did not consider the mystery solved, but said Mr Wells’s mother was entitled to continue asking questions about what happened to her son.
