In an interview with the outlet published Saturday (July 11), Tracestin Shepherd, 20, said he is the person heard yelling in the widely circulated video, and that the altercation had nothing to do with Nolan.
“In that video, you hear somebody yelling — that is me,” Shepherd told RS. “It’s me yelling — my exact wording is, ‘Get me off this f**king boat.’ I wanted to fight, and I’d felt like I hadn’t had my fair share.”
He added: “Those were not Nolan’s words, they were mine.”
Shepherd’s account contradicts remarks made Friday (July 10) by civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who at a press conference said Wells could be heard in the video saying, “Give me my f**king phone, what are you f**king doing?”
According to Shepherd, around 3:30 p.m. on July 4, he and a group of friends from high school — including Wells — were at Horn Island celebrating the holiday, per RS.
Shepherd and his family had taken a 45-minute boat ride to meet up with Wells and other friends who had been there since that morning, a trip the group often made on weekends. While waist-deep in the water, Shepherd got into a disagreement with his girlfriend.
A male acquaintance from a nearby town who had not come on their boat inserted himself into the conversation. “I told him he needed to mind his own business,” Shepherd told the outlet.
The exchange escalated into a physical altercation.
Shepherd’s uncle — who raised him like a father — told him to get on the boat and head home. Shepherd complied, but changed his mind and tried to go back to shore, where his friends had begun defending him.
It was at that point that someone on a nearby boat began filming.
Shepherd’s girlfriend, his uncle, and a family friend all corroborated his account to RS.
The family friend, who asked not to be named, said he was the person seen in the video trying to calm Shepherd down.
“He want[ed] to get off the boat and go fight the dude who he got into it with,” the friend told RS. “Nobody knows what Tracestin was saying better than me because he was screaming it in my face.”
As for Wells — Shepherd told the outlet his friend wasn’t even visible in the video. Shepherd also said the young man in the video people have mistaken for Wells is too short to be his six-foot-two-inch friend.
