Nolan Xavier Wells was 18, from Ocean Springs, and on July 4 he went with a group of high school friends by boat to Horn Island, the federal barrier island off the Mississippi coast. His friends came back that evening. He did not. His body was found at about 8:45 a.m. on July 6, off the shore of the island's northwest end, according to WLOX and CNN. On Sept. 21 a Jackson County grand jury returned a unanimous no true bill, meaning it found no one to charge with a crime. Since then a familiar argument has taken hold: the system looked, the system found nothing, so nothing happened. That argument does not survive contact with the documents.

Start with what the grand jury actually said. District Attorney Angel Myers McIlrath told reporters the panel of 23 reviewed 132 subpoenas and heard 43 witnesses. Its report found that the position, condition, time of discovery, and location of the body were consistent with drowning, that there was no credible evidence anyone traveling to or from the island committed a crime connected to his death, and no evidence of a physical altercation or argument that day, according to WLOX and NPR. Read that carefully. It is a finding that the evidence the jurors saw did not rule out an accidental drowning and did not prove a crime. It is not a finding of what happened to him. Nobody in Mississippi has made that finding, because nobody can.

The two people whose job it was to determine how he died both declined to. The State Medical Examiner's Office, in an autopsy performed by Dr. Staci Turner, listed the cause and manner of death as undetermined, according to the report the family released and ABC News described. So did Dr. Roger Mitchell Jr., the former chief medical examiner for Washington, D.C., whom the family hired to perform an independent autopsy on July 10. Both reports describe drowning as a diagnosis of exclusion: a conclusion a pathologist reaches only after every other cause has been ruled out. Neither pathologist was willing to reach it.

Now the lungs. The state examiner found no fluid or debris in the airways, an empty stomach, and no water in the stomach, according to the report as described at the family's Sept. 24 press conference and by Mississippi Today. People who drown usually inhale and swallow water in the struggle. The absence of water is not proof he did not drown. Forensic textbooks describe deaths in water without fluid in the lungs, and decomposition, which was advanced after two days in July heat, can drain or obscure what was there. But the honest reading cuts the other way too. The single most common positive sign of drowning is missing, and the older idea that ten to fifteen percent of drownings are dry has been challenged in the forensic literature, where reviews of supposedly dry-lung drownings found signs of inhaled liquid in the great majority. Absence of water does not settle the question. It removes the one finding that usually settles it in favor of drowning.

Then the head. The state autopsy documented two dark red-purple contusions on the back of the scalp, each about two inches, according to the report and Mississippi Today. Dr. Mitchell went further. His final report, released by the family's attorney Ben Crump, describes recent, unexplained blunt-force injuries to the back of the head and to the back, and characterizes a 12-by-8-inch area the state had called discoloration as blood from bruising. His histology found no white blood cells at the injury, which he interpreted as evidence the injury occurred shortly before death; the family's legal team put it at within about four hours. He also wrote that the state examiner documented the bruising but did not take close-up photographs, dissect the scalp, or take tissue sections of it, according to reporting on the report by Atlanta Black Star and Mississippi Free Press.

That last point is the one to hold onto, because it is not about interpretation. A pathologist who suspects a head injury contributed to a death sections the tissue. The state examiner, by the independent report's account, did not. The grand jury was therefore deciding whether a blow to the back of the head mattered without the basic pathology work that would have said how hard it was, or when it happened, or whether it could have left an 18-year-old unconscious in the water. The toxicology could not help either: the grand jury report itself said the alcohol result came from decompositional fluid and was unreliable, because decomposition produces alcohol on its own.

The phone is the part of the record that changed after he was dead. Nolan left his phone on the boat, along with many other phones, because he planned to be in the water, a friend told ABC News. The boat's GPS, reported by CBS News, shows it left the mainland at 9:56 a.m., reached the western tip of Horn Island at 11:14 a.m., left the island at 4:31 p.m., and was back at 5:44 p.m. Nolan was last seen around 3 p.m. His family got a call from a friend around 11 p.m. and reported him missing.

Garrett Discovery, an Orlando forensics firm hired by the family, imaged the phone and recovered more than a million artifacts, examiner Andrew Garrett said at the Sept. 24 press conference. The phone's own GPS traces the day: a morning stop at a McDonald's, the trip to the island, then a dock and a boat ramp around 7:20 p.m., with photos and video showing it aboard the boat. Nolan last used the phone at about 2:18 p.m. His parents received it from friends around 3 a.m. the next morning. Between those two times, Garrett said, Snapchat content on the device was deleted. He said he could not tell who did it, only that somebody had to take a user action to delete data.

The district attorney's answer came the same day, and it deserves to be quoted in full: the user action Garrett described is from other Snapchat users, not someone physically accessing Nolan Wells' phone, and no one physically accessed the phone after his last known use and before his parents received it. She said the family's team had not provided evidence to the contrary, accused it of waiting until shortly before the grand jury to run its examination and of giving jurors only portions of the findings, and told Crump to stop playing games, per WLOX. Three of the friends, through their attorney, said they did not erase anything and never had access to the phone, and said they intend to sue Crump for defamation, NewsNation and TMZ reported.

Both of those things can be true and still leave the question open. Snapchat lets a sender unsend a message, which removes it from the recipient's phone too. If that is what happened, then people who were with Nolan that day, or who were messaging him, pulled back messages while he was missing or after he was found. That is not a crime, and it may be entirely innocent. It is also not nothing. It means the record of his last afternoon was edited by someone other than him, and the only body that has reviewed the full device image and the Snapchat server records, if anyone has, is the prosecutor's office that closed the case. Snapchat's servers know who deleted what and when. A subpoena would say.

There is also the video. Crump has said a clip shot from a boat captures Nolan among a group on the island demanding his phone back. Tracestin Shepherd, a friend who was there, told ABC News the voice on the video is his own, that Nolan is not in it, and that the argument was Shepherd wanting off a boat to continue a fight with someone else. Shepherd also said Nolan met a young woman on the island and chose to stay while the group went home, and that it was the first time they had met. The grand jury found no evidence of an altercation involving Nolan. Two of the friends returned to Horn Island in August, their attorneys told CNN, to study the layout and dynamic of the place. None of that is evidence of a crime. All of it is evidence that the last hours of a young man's life are being described by the people who left him there, and that the state's account rests on their account.

So put the pieces on the table. An 18-year-old college football player is found dead in the water. Two medical examiners will not call it a drowning. The state's examiner found no water where drowning usually leaves it, and documented but did not examine the injuries to the back of his head. An independent examiner timed those injuries to shortly before death and called them unexplained. The alcohol test is worthless. His phone, which he did not have, lost messages before it reached his parents, through an action the prosecutor attributes to other people. The people with him gave the account the investigation relied on. And the grand jury, having heard all of it, said it could not identify a crime. That is an accurate summary of a case that is unresolved. It is not a summary of a case in which nothing happened.

The people who say nothing happened are answering a question nobody asked. The question is not whether a jury could convict someone. It is whether the state of Mississippi can tell Christine and Elmore Wonsley how their son died, and it cannot. Sheriff John Ledbetter said early on there was no initial indication of a crime and that his office welcomed the family's independent investigation. The district attorney says the case remains open should new evidence emerge. Those are the words of an investigation that has stopped, not one that has finished.

What's next: The family, Crump, and the NAACP have asked the U.S. Department of Justice to review the case, and the Congressional Black Caucus has written to Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel requesting a federal review; Horn Island is part of the Gulf Islands National Seashore, which gives federal authorities a jurisdictional reason to look, as Newsweek has noted. Three things would move the case from argument to evidence: Snapchat's server records of the deletions, obtainable by subpoena; a neutral forensic review of the full phone image against the prosecutor's account; and, if the tissue was preserved, the scalp sections the state examiner did not take. The district attorney has said the door is open. Those three requests are how to walk through it.