[quote] Authorities Reveal Suspicions from Strange Scene Where Noah Presgrove’s Body Was Found
Jeremie Wilson has been the sheriff in Jefferson County, Oklahoma, since 2017 — and worked in law enforcement since 2005 and served in the military before that — and he says he’s never seen anything quite like the death of 19-year-old Noah Presgrove.
Wilson was one of the first authorities on the scene early on Sept. 4 after two 911 callers reported seeing Noah's body while driving down Highway 81 just outside of Terral, Oklahoma.
“It just — it looked awful odd,” the first caller, who identified himself only as Tyler, told the dispatcher, according to audio of the call that was released to PEOPLE.
Undersheriff Jimmy Williams was soon sent out; Sheriff Wilson joined him not long after, along with members of Terral’s volunteer fire department, who helped secure the scene.
Nearly a year later, it remains unclear how Noah died.
His autopsy report, obtained by PEOPLE in May, states that he was killed by “multiple blunt force injuries” — including serious head wounds — but that the cause of those injuries is “undetermined.”
A state police probe is ongoing. Authorities said in May that they weren't looking into the death "as a murder.”
“What I saw from the very beginning, I personally did not believe this was a hit-and-run,” Wilson, the Jefferson County sheriff, said in an interview, while also making clear that he was speaking only in his capacity as a first responder in September because the state immediately assumed jurisdiction, given that the death was reported on the highway.
What Wilson saw that morning was this, he says: Noah was naked and on his back, with “a couple of teeth laying next to his body.” According to his autopsy, he wore only a pair of mismatched shoes, and a pair of white printed shorts were nearby that showed no "observable damage."
“There was blood on the scene, but not as much as there should have been, let me put it that way,” Wilson says. “Even if you were hit by a passenger car by highway speeds that night … there should have been a lot more blood.”
What’s more, he says, "There was not a lot of road rash like he slid, he got hit at 65 miles an hour … That was not the case.”
Also odd, according to Wilson, “There was no vehicular parts.”
“If you hit a deer, which deer get hit out here all the time, always deer and cows — I don't care if you got hit by a semi, there is a piece of a fender. There is a piece of the under fender. … There is a headlight, there is a mirror, there is always something.”
Despite searching through “half a mile of the ditches,” investigators “found nothing,” Wilson says.
Authorities did recover some, but not all, of a silver chain that Noah often wore. Wilson calls that another oddity.
“This whole situation didn’t sit well with me,” he says, noting the unusual inability of the scene itself to provide more insight.
“We've had people hit before, and we can recreate the scene and make it make sense, make it fill the gaps,” the sheriff says. “We've had unattended deaths, suicides that the evidence always gives us the facts. We can always backtrack and recreate 99% of the scene.”
But not here.
(More at link)