‘I Fear Nothing’: Black Audio Engineer Defends Viral Nolan Wells Audio That Point to Foul Play Amid Legal Threats
It took Netta Brantley nine hours to enhance and restore the 37-second portion of the Sea Tow audio call that many people say reveals Nolan Wells was possibly dead on the boat off Mississippi’s Gulf Coast — and not on Horn Island with a female friend — as the official narrative has claimed since last month.
Since then, the Black audio engineer has received pushback from doubters who claim, without evidence, that someone “doctored” the audio.
But Brantley, who has spent more than 15 years working as an audio engineer, stands by her work and is even encouraging the FBI to use its superior methods to enhance the audio further.
“They have better equipment,” Brantley said in an exclusive interview with Atlanta Black Star. “They have the equipment to break down and analyze the words being said.”
Brantley said she uses traditional digital audio workstations like Logic Pro X, Pro Tools, Adobe Audition and Cubase.
The FBI, however, uses far more advanced forensic audio software that could produce an even clearer version of what people said during the 37-second clip. The FBI has not publicly stated that it will do so.
“If (attorney Ben) Crump actually got the right person or people on his team, everything that I and thousands of others have been saying will all be revealed,” Brantley said.
“They definitely have the equipment that I don’t have, and I don’t have access to that makes my stuff look like nothing.”
On Thursday, Crump, who represents Wells’ family, said they have retained forensic audio experts to further enhance the audio.
Was Wells on the Boat?
The mystery surrounding Wells’ death began on the Fourth of July when Wells joined friends on a boat trip to Horn Island, a barrier island in the Gulf of Mexico about ten miles off the Mississippi coast.
Wells, 18, who graduated from high school in 2025, was attending and playing football at Southwest Mississippi Community College as a wide receiver. About 300 young people, many of whom were former high school classmates of Wells, had also gathered on the island to celebrate Independence Day.
Warren Hudson, 18, one of the last people to see Wells alive, describes himself as one of Wells’ close friends. Hudson said that when he and other young people left the island around 3 p.m., he encouraged Wells to join them, but Wells stayed behind with a girl, telling the others he would leave on another boat.
The boat left the island around 4 p.m., but a mechanical issue with the water pump caused it to take on water, prompting the group to call Sea Tow for help. The recording of that call became public on July 26 and begins with undecipherable chatter in the background while the caller waits on hold for the dispatcher to answer.
“Sea Tow assistance, Vicky speaking, how can I help you?” the dispatcher says.
“Hey, we’re at the west tip of Horn and our bilge pump stopped working, we’re going, we’re sinking. Can you all please come?”
A U.S. National Park Service ranger found Wells’ body on July 6, facedown in the water in the same general area where the boat had been when the group made the call two days earlier.
An autopsy has been completed but not released and there is mistrust with the state’s medical examiner who has a questionable history. Wells’ family also sought an independent autopsy, but it was inconclusive due to missing body parts.
‘Can We Cover It Up’
The undecipherable chatter captured Brantley’s attention when she heard it, especially since she had been following the case closely after Wells’ mother, Christine Wonsley, who is her friend on Facebook, began talking about it shortly after the young man’s death.
She said she had just woken up, played the audio, and felt certain she heard Nolan’s name in the background chatter. She said she played it a few times just to be sure before deciding to enhance it.
“I definitely heard someone say Nolan, they’re yelling Nolan but allegedly he wanted to stay behind with the girl.”
“He shouldn’t have been on that boat so why are they even yelling his name?”
She said other people on social media were saying the same thing, so later that night she spent several hours enhancing the first 37 seconds of the audio, sticking to traditional methods rather than AI, which can sometimes fabricate sounds that were not there.
She heard a voice saying something like “can we cover it up,” and then she heard the name “Bart” — a name the media had not yet mentioned.
“That part stood out to me the most because I heard ‘damn it Bart,’ and I remember asking my wife, who was next to me, ‘who is Bart?’” she said. “Like that was one of those things where nobody had even heard that name. And so that alone stood out to me.”
‘You Killed Him’
She posted her enhanced video on her Instagram channel along with a transcript of what she believed people were saying in the background, urging her followers to draw their own conclusions by comparing it to the original video released earlier.
Her transcript is below:
“Can we cover it up?”
“Yeah, I thought all about that.”
“Oh.”
“You killed him.”
“He’s already dead?”
“Is he dead (yeah).”
“Oh, my god.”
“Nolan, wake up.”
“Wyatt!”
“(Yells) Get/Wake Up!”
“(Yells) Get the f_ck up!”
“Dammit, Bart!”
“Nono’s really dead now.”
The video went viral, with many people across the country agreeing they heard exactly what she heard.
“I believe the police and the medical examiner should be charged federally for obstruction of justice and breach of Oath of Office,” said one commenter, out of more than 900 comments.
“We must file complaint we the State Medical Board to pull the medical examiner license to practice.”
“Who’s Bart? Sounds like he did something,” added another commenter.
Bart Edminston
Brantley and many other people online believe the Bart in the audio is Bart Edminston Jr., a former classmate of Wells who also played football with him in high school and now punts for the University of Wyoming football team.
Edminston’s family hired a lawyer, Russell Latino, who said Edminston was not even on the boat from which the call was made.
“There are an awful lot of people that are assuming that the people who loved Nolan, that considered him their friends, are culpable in his death,” Latino said on Chris Cuomo’s show.
“We don’t see any legitimacy in a doctored transcript or doctored audio that comes with a transcript, which is a nice psychological sort of game that people play with garbled audio,” Latino said.
The attorney also posted on Facebook that he was sending a cease-and-desist letter to a New Orleans woman named Kymbra Li, accusing her of defamation for accusing Edminston of murder.
Li, who has 88,000 followers on Instagram and describes herself as a comedian, recording artist, digital creator and legal scholar, refused to back down, telling Latino to “bring it on.”
Brantley, who has not received a cease-and-desist letter, noted that Latino never mentioned her by name when he accused her of doctoring the video — likely because doing so would expose him to his own defamation allegations.
Brantley stressed that she will not back down to legal threats and intimidation.
“I fear nothing,” she said. “Their scare tactics don’t work on me.”
“I didn’t doctor anything. I didn’t alter any audio. I didn’t introduce AI fake voice on top of anything,” she continued.
“I didn’t do nothing wrong so there is no reason for me to back down. All I want is justice for Nolan.”