Despite all the unanswered questions swirling around the death of Noah Presgrove, everyone agrees on this: The 19-year-old’s naked body had severe wounds when it was found by the side of the highway on Sept. 4, People magazine reports.
According to the report by People magazine, Noah’s autopsy, released in May, details the extent of the blunt force trauma that killed him, including major head and skull injuries the middle base of his skull was split in two — as well as life-threatening fractures of his spinal vertebrae and more.
But his official manner of death remains “undetermined.”
According to 911 calls, Noah’s body was found shortly before 6 a.m. local time on Labor Day 2023 along Highway 81, just a few miles outside Terral in southern Oklahoma.
Noah Presgrove was naked except for a pair of mismatched shoes, his autopsy states. A pair of white printed shorts were nearby that showed no “observable damage,” along with “three pieces of a white metal chain as well as part of a tooth [that were] present several feet [away].”
(The chain — one of Noah’s favorites was never recovered in its entirety, one first responder told People magazine.)
A “clump of hair” was found on his body, according to his autopsy; another clump was nearby. But no vehicle debris was observed, the autopsy states.
The teen was first spotted by two passing drivers, the 911 calls show. State authorities are still investigating — and, nearly a year later, his family is also digging for answers.
Investigators have said they aren’t looking at the death as a murder but have declined to comment further, citing their ongoing work.
Outside experts say the detailed findings of the medical examiner’s report hold some clues as to how Noah Presgrove died while also showing how difficult it may be to solve the key mysteries.
“The problem with this case is that there’s so much unknown,” Dr. Priya Banerjee, a board-certified forensic pathologist, told People magazine.
Banerjee is unconnected to the investigation but reviewed the autopsy and discussed her views in an interview.
“Whatever happened to cause these injuries was a lot of force,” she says. “You don’t get a skull fracture, you don’t get vertebral fractures, you don’t get rib fractures, all this bleeding, without the body being struck with a lot of force. I think the difficulty is this all could be consistent with a hit and run, possibly with some dragging, but I can’t really exclude some of this coming from a fight.”
Banerjee says that according to the autopsy, Noah appears to have been predominantly hit on the left side of his head. “There’s a significant force applied that causes the base of his skull to fracture,” she says, also noting bleeding around and into his brain.
She singles out a large wound to the top left part of his head — what’s referred to in the autopsy as an abraded laceration. “That’s where his scalp is basically torn and lifted off the skull,” Banerjee says.
But “that’s a weird part to get to, the top of your head is hard to reach,” she explains. “You don’t just fall back and injure that. Something happened there where a force hit him or he hit something.”
According to Noah’s autopsy, that wound was nearly 8 inches in total area, revealing bone; there were also scrapes or cuts on his left eyebrow, left eye and left cheek as well as his left ear and the left side of his neck and on the left side of his tongue.
Though some of the first people on the scene, including Jefferson County Sheriff Jeremie Wilson, have told PEOPLE that they didn’t observe as much blood as might have been expected given Noah’s injuries, Banerjee notes that Noah’s neck and skull injuries “would mean a rapid death and thus yield little bleeding.”
Moving down his body, Banerjee highlights road rash-like injuries on his back plus abrasions (or scrapes) on his shoulder, butt, arms and legs.
“Was he hit and dragged a little bit?” she says. “Possibly.”
He suffered “major trauma” to his torso as well as his head, with less damage to his arms and legs, Banerjee says, citing the autopsy: “He has a lot of bleeding within the chest cavity. Both of his shoulder blades are fractured, he has lots of rib fractures, left and right. His spinal column has multiple fractures, and he has bleeding within the sides of the chest and around the heart. Both of his lungs are punctured.”
Banerjee also calls attention to what the autopsy shows was not present — like “no vehicle parts or debris.”
“If it was a hit and run, there should be car parts like a broken tail light, a broken headlight. … That’s not necessarily the case, but usually there’s some debris,” Banerjee says. “If someone’s left on the side of the road, more often than not, we think of a hit and run. But you also have to be worried that someone was dumped.”
Medical examiners cannot investigate themselves; that is the province of the police.
“I can’t look at the injuries and say I know exactly how these occurred and that’s why it’s undetermined,” Banerjee says. “Was it a car accident, like a hit and run? Was it an intentional strike with a vehicle? Did someone beat him up and dump him? There’s so many possibilities, and nothing about the injury pattern will help narrow it down further.”
Some key details have been publicly confirmed including that, before he died, Noah was partying with friends over the Labor Day weekend not far from where his body was found on Highway 81.
According to Noah’s autopsy, he had a “roll over incident” while riding an ATV during the party on Sept. 3 but then “returned to the party where he got into an argument” and subsequently left.
“I don’t think any significant injuries that caused his death were related to the ATV because we know that he was alive and returned to the party. Could he have bumps, some of the scrapes, some of the bruises? Sure,” Banerjee says. “Then — did someone push him out of a car, run him over? I just don’t know. Was there a motor vehicle incident after? Probably.”
The information from Noah’s injuries only answers some but not all of the questions. “These are the cases that are gray. They’re not black and white,” Banerjee says.
Noah’s best friend, Jack Newton, was at the party with him that weekend. Jack told People magazine that Noah Presgrove and some others went riding on Jack’s ATV around 3 a.m. on Sept. 4 — while Jack was sleeping — and, while Noah was driving, “It just turned over on the side.”
No one was seriously injured, Jack says, and Noah showered and then walked off at 3:30 a.m., less than three hours before being found dead.
But Jack also says that this is what he was told later, because he says he was asleep. Various accounts conflict.
“Everybody I asked will tell you a different story,” he says of one of the details, about Noah getting cleaned up after the ATV incident.
Everett Baxter Jr., a forensic analyst and former Oklahoma police officer, echoes Banerjee in saying that Noah likely didn’t sustain his serious trauma, such as the vertebrae fractures, on the ATV.
“If that occurred during the crash … he would’ve been dead. He wouldn’t have moved,” Baxter says.
At the same time, Baxter, who like Banerjee is unconnected to the case but reviewed the autopsy as an expert, suggests that Noah could have suffered some kind of head injury on the ATV that affected his behavior and demeanor.
But even so, the way in which Noah’s body was found is so odd: “You’ve got to go back and answer that question, why was he nude?” Baxter says.
“Did the clothes come off because he took them off or did they come off because somebody else took them off?” he says.
Police have said they are continuing to look at what really happened to the teenager.
But to Baxter, it feels like “some people are not sharing all of the information.”
“That’s common with that part of the state,” he says, referring to the rural communities along the Oklahoma-Texas border, which follows the twists of the Red River.
“That part of the state, people — they don’t share information freely,” he says.