Case Timeline

Every point is a dated, independently reported event, from the July 4 boat trip through the
September 27 protest in Ocean Springs. Hover a point for the event.

National Drowning Data: Where Nolan Wells’ Case Fits

Nolan Wells’ death is one case; these are the real national patterns around it. The
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracks unintentional drowning deaths by race
every year. Black Americans have died from drowning at a higher rate than White Americans
in every year from 2019 through 2022.

The Risk Gap, by Age and Setting (3D)

This chart adds a dimension a flat bar chart can’t show at once: how the Black-vs-White
drowning risk ratio changes by both age group and where the drowning happens. The
ridge at ages 10-14 in swimming pools (7.6× the White rate) is the starkest single
number in the underlying CDC study; the natural-water numbers at ages 15-19 and 20-24
(2.0× and 1.4×) are the closest age bracket to Nolan Wells, who was 18 and died
in open water off a barrier island, not a pool. Drag the chart to rotate it.

Horn Island’s Own Record

Separately from the national data above: Jackson County’s own Coroner’s Office, responding
to an open-records request first reported by PEOPLE and covered by NewsNation and TheGrio
(September 9–11, 2026), found no recorded drowning deaths on Horn Island in
the six years before Wells’ death (2020–2025). That does not establish what
happened to Wells; it is a real, dated data point about how unusual a drowning at that
specific location has been, reported here as context, not as proof of any particular cause.

Methodology & Sources

1. CDC, MMWR Vital Signs (May 2024). Progress on Childhood Injury Prevention:
   Drowning. Primary government source for the 2019-2022 by-race rates and the national
   swim-skill survey. cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/wr/mm7320e1.htm
2. CDC, MMWR 70(24) (June 2021). Persistent Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Fatal
   Unintentional Drowning Rates Among Persons Aged ≤29 Years — United States,
   1999–2019. Primary government source for the by-age, by-setting rate ratios.
   cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7024a1.htm
3. PEOPLE, via open-records request to the Jackson County Coroner’s Office;
   reported by NewsNation and TheGrio (September 9–11, 2026). Secondary reporting of a
   primary government record. newsnationnow.com

Investigative methodology: this page was produced by scripts/nolan_wells_dashboard.py
from the real, cited government datasets above — not a language model. The timeline’s
dates are drawn from the same sourcing used in Kemetic Minds’ written coverage of this case;
see the in-depth report’s own References for a source per event.