Donald Wells, the 61-year-old father of missing Tennessee girl Summer Wells, entered the Hawkins County Jail at 4:15 a.m. Tuesday on a domestic assault charge, court records show. He was due in court for arraignment at 9 a.m. Wednesday.
Details remain thin. Neither a spokesperson for the Wells family nor the sheriff’s office immediately responded to requests for comment, and the records say little beyond the charge itself.
A Record Predating the Arrest
This isn’t Wells’ first run-in with the law. He has faced prior arrests on domestic assault, DUI and firearms charges, all unrelated to his daughter’s disappearance. In 2020, officials served him with a civil order of protection on behalf of his wife.
The arrest comes as the case enters its fifth unsolved year. Summer Wells was 5 when she vanished from her family’s home in rural Rogersville. Her mother, Candus Bly, told police she last saw the girl at their home on Ben Hill Road on June 15, 2021, after Summer came inside from planting flowers with her grandmother. Summer would now be 10. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children released an age-progressed image of what she might have looked like at 9.
The Investigation
The parents say they believe someone entered their 11-acre property, lured Summer outside and took her. No suspects have been publicly identified. Investigators sought a potential witness who drove a red pickup truck with full-sized ladder racks and white buckets in the bed.
Summer was about 3 feet tall and around 40 pounds when she was last seen. She wore gray pants and a pink shirt, may have been barefoot, and had blonde hair.
Family Circumstances
The couple’s other children left the home after Summer vanished. The family’s website says a Department of Child Services investigation cleared the parents, but they haven’t regained custody of their sons. Summer’s parents both have criminal records. Bly’s sister, Rose Marie Bly, was reported missing from Wisconsin in 2009, and that case remains unsolved.
Anyone with information about Summer’s whereabouts is asked to call the Hawkins County Sheriff’s Office at 423-272-7121 or the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation at 1-800-TBI-FIND. Tips can be emailed to [email protected].
Why This Matters:
Five years on, the Summer Wells case tests whether local and state law enforcement can deliver answers in a high-profile missing-child investigation. The arrest of a family member on a separate charge doesn’t change the central fact: no suspect has been publicly identified, and a child is still missing. It also shows how the justice system handles one case at a time. A domestic assault charge will move through arraignment and the courts on its own merits, separate from the larger mystery. Taxpayers have funded a prolonged search across multiple agencies, and the public expects accountability and results. Until investigators produce answers, tips from ordinary citizens remain the most practical hope of resolving what happened to Summer.
- summer wells
- donald wells
- tennessee
- domestic assault
- missing persons
- rogersville
- candus bly
- hawkins county sheriff