Full horror of Noah Presgrove’s mysterious death revealed: The tasteless leaked message… teeth found next to his body on Oklahoma highway… and smell of bleach where the teen was last seen alive

Noah Presgrove, 19, was discovered naked with his teeth knocked out by the side of the US-81 highway near Terral, Oklahoma, on September 4, 2023.

He suffered massive head and upper body injuries that led him to die from internal bleeding, but the cause of those injuries still remains a mystery three years later.

No suspect has ever been arrested or even identified by tight-lipped police, who say they are still investigating but refuse to reveal any details.

Presgrove’s death has since become one of the country’s most intriguing unsolved mysteries that is endlessly debated online by those who insist it was a tragic accident and others who believe he was murdered.

The teen’s family appear to be part of the latter’s camp, and sued six of his friends and three adults claiming he was beaten to death. All of them have denied liability.

Here is everything we know about the hours leading up to Presgrove’s death, what happened afterwards, and the search for answers over the three years since. 

Who was Noah Presgrove?

Noah Alexander Presgrove was born May 14, 2004, in Duncan, Oklahoma, to Victor Presgrove and Kasey Elliot.

He grew up largely in Comanche, the next town south on US-81, and had a chaotic upbringing as his mother struggled with substance abuse.

Elliot, now known as Kasey Smith, her maiden name, was charged with a DUI when Presgrove was just a baby, and later embezzlement and burglary.

She was charged in July with domestic assault and battery in the presence of a minor, in a case that is still ongoing.

Victor, 53, eventually married Tara Stengel, 53, and Presgrove has nine siblings between his two biological parents.

Presgrove spent time living with his friends’ families and was emancipated at the age of 17 and adopted his father’s last name instead of his legal one, Nichols.

He was living with his grandmother Deborah Smith and great-grandmother Sandra Quisenberry, in a room on an expensive rural property, at the time of his death.

Despite all this instability, he became a good student and a star on the Comanche High School wrestling team until his graduation in May 2023.

He toyed with the idea of pursuing the sport at university, but realized he would need an athletic scholarship. 

Instead, he planned to enlist in the US Marine Corps after his cousin Travis graduated the following year. He never got the chance.

Who are the friends who were with him before he died?

Jack Newton, 22, Presgrove’s best friend who also lived in Comanche and was a high school classmate and frequent companion.

Presgrove briefly lived with Jack’s family including his father Caleb Newton, who was also dragged into the mystery until he was recently dropped from the lawsuit.

Carter Combs, 24, Jack’s girlfriend at the time of Presgrove’s death, now fiancée and mother of their daughter Nobie Tate Newton.

Avery Jo Combs, 25, legal last name Howard, Carter’s older sister and the subject of the days-long 22nd birthday party at which Presgrove died.

Logan Jernigan, 21, a close friend of the Combs sisters who was living with them at their grandfather Johnnie Wilcoxson’s house where the party was held.

Kaden Pressy, 22, friend who broke ranks with the rest of the group to claim Jack found Presgrove’s body an hour before the 911 calls.

Jasmine Millan, 22, one of the friends still awake at the very end of the night when Presgrove went missing.

Brylan Sweat, friend of the group seen in the final known video of Presgrove being dared to slap him across the face.

Mikey Lair, friend of the group who briefly blamed Presgrove for his misplaced phone during the party.

Isaac Rojas, friend of the group seen holding a rifle in the last known video of Presgrove.

The lost weekend

The party was to celebrate the 22nd birthday of Avery Jo Combs, whose family are huge landowners in the area around Terral and beyond.

Advertised to friends on Snapchat, it was held at her grandfather’s house – one of three on a small dirt road off the highway 1.2 miles north of town and surrounded by fields.

The group lived in the various small towns dotted along US-81, including Ryan, Waurika, Duncan and Comanche – where Presgrove lived.

About 40 people showed up, coming and going over the course of the weekend, and videos of the increasingly drunken antics popped up online.

These clips, watched by many locals as they were posted, became the only record of the last hours of Presgrove’s life.

One from the Saturday night showed some of Presgrove’s friends, including Avery, writing their names on his bare buttocks with marker.

At some point that night, Presgrove got into an argument with Jack Newton after the latter didn’t like that he was huddled in a corner talking to his girlfriend Carter.

‘We argued about girls for a second then ended up holding each other crying, telling each other how much we meant to one another,’ Jack told a friend in the weeks after Presgrove’s death.

Avery was also upset on Saturday night that Presgrove, whom she was said to be sleeping with at the time, was too close to another of their friends.

‘Noah fell asleep on the ground with Logan [Jernigan] on Saturday night – they didn’t do anything, but when I woke up I remember Avery saying to Logan “if you did anything, I was gonna kill y’all” but they laughed it off,’ Pressy later told police.

This remark appeared to be the basis of a claim in the first amended complaint of the lawsuit that Avery ‘made one or more statements about harming or killing him.’

Presgrove drove home late that night and showered, but it was not clear how much of the stubborn marker he was able to get off in the shower.

Sunday night, identified in videos by the black shorts he was wearing, involved more drunken hijinks. Some showed a shirtless Presgrove dancing inside the house, along with other partygoers, and a woman running through a piece of cardboard head first.

Photos around the same time showed Presgrove posing with his friends making silly faces, and standing in a bathroom with Jack.

Later in the evening, as the number of guests dwindled, those left began daring each other to slap them across the face while they stood still.

Presgrove took a palm to the face from a young blonde woman as they partied under an outside patio at the house, and barely flinched.

The final video, the last known footage of Presgrove alive, showed him daring his friend Brylan Sweat to slap him as the girl had earlier.

Presgrove had to repeatedly insist that Sweat hit him, who eventually only gave him a light tap before sprinting away in playful fear of retaliation. 

The same video showed another friend, Isaac Rojas, holding a rifle in the background as Presgrove cajoled Sweat into slapping him.

Presgrove fought at another point in the night after another friend, Mikey, accused him of hiding his phone. 

Presgrove’s family claimed Mikey ‘fishhooked’ him, and had his finger bitten in retaliation – but some friends insisted the argument was never physical. 

The phone was found under another friend who was sleeping on a couch, and the two boys made up.

The ATV accident 

The story of the ATV accident is so universally agreed upon that it made it into the autopsy report. Presgrove emerged from it unscathed. 

‘Earlier that night he [was riding in an ATV] and he flipped it but then after that he was just hanging out at the house,’ Stephanie Milan, one of the girls who was there, wrote in a Snapchat message to an inquiring local.

‘Like he turned it on its side but they flipped it back on its wheels.’

But the details, and what happened afterwards, vary wildly depending on who you talk to – some saying it happened about midnight and others at 3am.

Jack, who owned the Polaris Ranger side-by-side, claimed he went to bed at 1.50am, and didn’t even know about the accident until the next morning.

‘I took my keys out of the SxS and apparently Noah came in my room and grabbed them while I was asleep. A bunch of people went and drove the Ranger and wrecked it,’ he told the Daily Mail in a 2024 interview.

Jack said he went to bed early because he was going fishing on Waurika Lake, about 30 miles north of Terral, with his father the next morning.

Presgrove is generally agreed to be the one driving the Ranger when it flipped, and though he wasn’t injured, he was dirtied from when it hit the ground.

Carter and Jasmine are said to have helped him shower to clean the dirt off as he was too drunk to do it himself.

Avery’s mother Stevie Howard wrote in a Facebook comment that a video was posted online that showed them showering him, though it has not emerged since.

Others said they remembered seeing the video at the time, but some of them claimed Presgrove was barely responsive.

The autopsy report said only a stick figure drawn in marker on his back was still visible on his body when it was found.

When and how the names and doodles scribbled on him on the Saturday night, along with more on his front visible in a photo from the Sunday, were washed off is still a matter of considerable debate.

After showering, his friends said Presgrove put on a different pair of shorts – described as being white in the autopsy report – and no underwear. Jack described them as ‘loose-fitting wrestling shorts’.

Presgrove soon after argued with Avery after he asked to sleep in her bed, but she refused and told him he had to sleep on the floor.

‘She told him he couldn’t sleep in her bed because he messed with her friend the night before,’ Jack told a friend earlier this year.

The argument upset him, and he wandered off into the night ‘to cool off,’ never to be seen alive again.

‘He walked off to clear his head but he wasn’t mad and there was no beef… We don’t know why he got mad. No one had beef,’ Stephanie wrote in her Snapchat message.

Exactly when Presgrove left the party is unclear, but his friends gave estimates of between 3.15am and 3.30am. 

The mismatched shoes

Presgrove was found naked by the side of the road with only a pair of shoes on, the shorts having fallen off in the middle of the road nearby.

One was his Adidas slip-on, and the other was a HeyDude branded slip-on.

Presgrove couldn’t find his other Adidas shoe, and so impulsively pulled on one he found lying around the house, his friends said.

Elisha Lee later explained the other shoe belonged to her son, Kaden Pressy, the friend who was asleep on the couch and was earlier lying on Mikey’s phone.

‘The shoes shown on the photo are my sons and on his feet. He had just had ACL and meniscus surgery and was wearing a pink knee brace, as seen on this Snapchat video provided to the OHP,’ she wrote, sharing one of the videos of the night.

‘One of these shoes sits on a shelf in my son’s closet. The other was found on Noah. 

‘When my son went to sleep, in this chair that evening, he kicked off his shoes and went to sleep.

‘When he was awoken by the sounds of his friend stating Noah was gone, he found his shoe was missing.’

Kaden later confirmed this story. 

Presgrove goes missing

Presgrove’s friends said he had a habit of wandering off from social gatherings and for a while they didn’t think that night was any different.

Jasmine posted a selfie to Snapchat at 3.41am with the caption ‘well, Noah’s missing,’ which continues to fuel condemnation years on from the tragedy.

‘I just want to make something clear I posted this picture not knowing that the worst was gonna happen, not knowing Noah would never come back,’ she later wrote in a Facebook post defending herself.

‘It was normal for Noah to wonder (sic) off nobody thought he wouldn’t be back. So don’t even think for a second just because I posted that means I know what happened to him because I’m just as clueless as everyone else.

‘I’m sick of it. Noah was my friend and I loved him so much. it hurts that people could even think that any of us could have done anything to hurt him. we all loved Noah.

‘Someone is really out there thinking they got away with murder because y’all are blaming us for something we didn’t do.’

Jack told a friend those still awake eventually did go looking for him, but were still not in fear of his safety.

‘After he was gone for a while, everyone was looking for him, they said, but knowing Noah I bet he was kidding and didn’t let anyone find him,’ he wrote.

He told the Daily Mail his ATV was even part of the search: ‘They said they took my Ranger to look for him in the ditches and stuff, but knowing Noah he was probably seeing everyone looking for him and was just hiding out.’

The friends said they didn’t find him and returned to the house, assuming he would eventually turn up.

Presgrove’s family claimed they saw a video of Avery and Carter screaming at each other on the front porch about him walking off, but the footage has never emerged.

Presgrove’s body is found – the 911 calls

Presgrove was only found when two vehicles traveling along US-81 spotted his body by the side of the road in the early hours of the morning and called 911.

The two callers were Gulfmark Energy field supervisor Tyler Hardy, and a semi-truck driver also named Tyler, who didn’t give his last name to the 911 operator.

Three calls were placed from the area, but one of them was just 20 seconds of static that local police said was Hardy on a bad signal.

‘He had a bad connection and he to re-call. I confirmed it was the same phone number,’ he said.

The first call, at 5.43am, was from Tyler, whom Hardy earlier said was a trucker for Oklahoma Petroleum Allies who turned around in Terral, about two miles south, and came back to the scene.

‘I had a bunch of cars behind me, but it looks like someone got hit, like somebody walking down the highway, [they are] lying on the shoulder in the road,’ he said.

‘Yeah, like on the shoulder, like maybe they were walking and somebody hit them… unless it was a deer, but it looked like a body.’

The dispatcher assured Tyler that she would have an officer respond to the situation, and then said Sheriff Wilson was on his way. 

Before the call ended, Tyler remarked that the scene ‘looked awful odd.’

Hardy, who was one of the cars behind Tyler, pulled over next to Presgrove and called 911 at 5.48am, immediately trying again after his first call failed.

‘I was driving to work south of Terral, and I am pretty sure someone is lying dead on the side of the road,’ he said.

‘They look naked, I’m staying back.’

The dispatcher told him that a deputy was heading toward the scene to address the situation.

Hardy responded that he was parked in the middle of the road, so he could prevent other motorists from driving over the body.

‘I am sitting here blocking the road. The body is lying right on the white line… I turned around because I just about hit it,’ he said.

‘At first, I thought it was a deer, and I was talking to a guy I work with and said, “I don’t think that is a deer.”‘

Hardy then told the dispatcher that ‘it actually looks like there’s a piece of clothing lying in the middle of the road.’

‘I don’t want to get too close… I’ll just go ahead and make sure nobody runs it over or anything else,’ he said.

The clothing was a pair of white shorts, according to the autopsy report, that some of Presgrove’s friends said he was last seen wearing.

By the time police arrived, the shorts were folded near Presgrove’s body, as they were described in the autopsy report.

Jack said he retrieved the shorts and folded them in the few minutes before local police arrived, to prevent vehicles running them over.

A little before 5.30am, local mechanic Chris Payette was driving south on US-81 when he felt a bump as he hit an object on the road, but drove on believing it was a small animal.

He contacted police later that day after hearing about Presgrove’s death, who examined his pickup truck and cleared him of any involvement.

The object he hit is believed to be a roll of carpet that was found a mile or two north of Presgrove’s body.

Police forensically tested his car about a year later after new investigators took over the case, and again cleared him.

What those first on the scene saw 

Hardy repeatedly insisted no one touched the body between when he saw it, and when police arrived.

‘I was the one who found the body so yes I can say 100 percent that nobody messed with Noah, I was the first person there,’ he said.

‘I know who and what I saw.’

The married father-of-two was driving south in darkness to an early shift when he spotted something in the headlights of his Ford F-150 work pickup truck.

He pulled over to take a closer look and realized he was looking at the body of a young man, dead by the side of the road.

Hardy said Presgrove’s body was lying on its side, totally naked except for mismatched shoes, with a pair of shorts lying on the road about 25ft away.

Crucially, Hardy said there was very little blood at the scene despite the teenager’s massive upper-body injuries, including three skull fractures.

‘I called it in and so did the truck driver, we were on the phone with them at the same time,’ he said.

‘We did not leave the scene until around 10 am and nobody was messing with anything.’

Less than 10 minutes after both he and the truck driver called 911, Presgrove’s best friend Jack Newton arrived.

‘Jack was the only person who walked up to Noah, and he told me who it was, until the Terral fire and Jefferson County Sheriffs showed up,’ Hardy said.

Jefferson County Undersheriff Jimmy Williams was the first policeman to arrive at the scene after the two motorists saw the body and called 911. 

Williams arrived at 6.18am and only took a brief look before focusing on securing the area but told the Daily Mail there was not enough blood for it to be starkly noticeable.

‘I didn’t observe a lot [of blood] from what little I was there checking – once we determined he was in fact dead, I was just securing the location,’ he said.

Williams couldn’t say if there was more or less blood than you would expect from Presgrove’s injuries, as he was not a medical expert, but it was not an obvious amount.

His observations aligned with Hardy, Jack and others who said there was very little blood around the teen’s body.

A medical expert told the Daily Mail that with the injuries detailed in Presgrove’s autopsy report, there would have been a lot of blood at the scene.

Williams also said Presgrove was not lying in the fetal position, as some people who saw the body recalled.

‘He was laying somewhat on his side, but I wouldn’t say he was in a fetal position, no,’ he said, saying his legs were straight and his arms not tucked into his body.

The undersheriff said there were only five people at the scene when he arrived, and he was joined by Sheriff Jeremie Wilson six minutes later at 6.24am.

Along with the two motorists who called 911 were two Terral Rural Volunteer Fire Department officers, including its chief, who arrived at 6.15am, and Newton.

Williams said from when he arrived to when he left at 8.17am, only the sheriff and Oklahoma Highway Patrol (OHP) troopers came to the scene.

‘We kept traffic moving except for people who needed to be there… not long after OHP arrived we shut the road down completely,’ he said.

Presgrove’s friends learn the bad news

Jack said he woke up ready to go fishing sometime after 5.30am and was told his best friend was missing.

‘I figured maybe he got a ride or something, Noah’s done that before – got mad and left,’ he told the Daily Mail.

‘He was not one you usually worry about. I wasn’t really thinking about it.’

Jack texted his father, Caleb Newton, at 5.53am, letting him know he was on his way.

‘I’ll meet y’all at the lake. Can you bring me a hat please… Someone messed with mine after I went to bed,’ he wrote. Caleb replied ‘ok.’

Jack assumed Presgrove was fine and left for the lake, driving north until he saw the semi-trailer and pickup by the side of the road.

In a Facebook post, Caleb explained how his son called him to tell him Presgrove was dead.

‘At about 6.05 I got a call no parent ever wants to get it was short and hard to understand him,’ he wrote.

‘I was standing on my boat in my yard, I know exactly where I was when that call came in.

‘I was getting [the] boat ready. Dad was making coffee. We were very actively getting ready to go to the lake.’

Caleb wrote that he immediately called his father, who was supposed to come fishing with them, to call the trip off – but was told to swing by his house less than a mile away pick him up.

He jumped in his wife’s car because it ‘was the most readily available’ and gunned it the 40 minutes down the highway from Comanche.

By the time he got there, local Jefferson County Sheriff’s deputies had arrived and were securing the scene.

Caleb wrote that when he arrived and saw the body, he called the teen’s father Victor Presgrove to break the horrific news.

Police covered the body with a tarpaulin or sheet and retrieved the shorts, which the autopsy report said were undamaged despite Presgrove’s injuries, from the middle of the road and neatly folded them nearby.

Presgrove’s family has claimed that Caleb picked up one of the teeth lying on the road, which he flatly denied.

‘The tooth that was on the road was not moved that I seen. I watched a police officer circle it with white chalk. I pointed out a tooth to the police, I would not have picked that up ever,’ he wrote.

He also said he was never at the party, as one rumor claims, and was at a cookout at a friend’s house south of Duncan – about an hour away – that night.

The cleanup 

Caleb said he stayed at the scene for hours until it was ‘cleared and processed’ before he went to the party house to retrieve Jack’s ATV.

‘I went to inspect the utv but there were no signs of damage or cleaning it was still very dusty it’s an old utv if it tipped it was minor enough to not leave scratches,’ he wrote.

Meanwhile, Jasmine and Stephanie’s mother Renee Milan had arrived at the house and ‘run off’ the remaining party guests and began to clean up.

The extent of the cleanup is hotly debated on social media with some claiming there was a ‘strong smell of bleach’ later in the day.

Renee, Stevie and Caleb insist all that was done was clearing up beer cans and other alcohol remnants, and there was no attempt to hide a crime scene.

‘It wasn’t like that. It was a bunch of sitting around and crying and I think people were just trying to stay busy,’ Stevie wrote on Facebook.

‘By people I mean parents cause we didn’t know what to do. Not to hide anything but to help our kids. Didn’t know how to help em.’

Caleb said he removed the guns from the house and took them his house, then ‘later and I got them to their owners’.

There are also conflicting opinions about whether police ever searched the house.

Presgrove’s family claimed the OHP told them that as there was no evidence where his body was found linking him to the party house and no evidence a crime was committed there, they couldn’t get a search warrant.

But others claimed police were let on to the property soon after Presgrove’s death and were even shown where the ATV crashed – but never did a forensic search.

The ATV was finally sold in April so Jack could buy a boat.

What happened to Presgrove’s clothes and belongings is also a source of controversy.

His family claim his clothes, including his American flag shirt he wore to the party but soon took off in the summer heat, were distributed among his friends by Caleb as ‘mementos’ after police examined them, and only his shorts were recovered.

Caleb dismissed this as a baseless rumor, but there is no definitive answer about what happened to the rest of his clothes.

Presgrove had just bought a new phone in the days before his death, and took it and his old one to the party, leaving them behind when he wandered off.

These were recovered and examined by detectives, then returned to his family, but his family claimed his wallet was never found and the last paycheck he got was never cashed.

What they think happened

Many locals and some of his family are convinced Presgrove was beaten to death, whether as a murder or in a fight that went too far, then dumped on the highway.

Suspicion has fallen on his friends for claiming they had no idea how he died, but they insist none of them could ever hurt him.

‘I guess everyone at the party could be lying but I just can’t see it,’ Jack told a friend.

‘I mean Noah’s closest friends. And you know if everyone was lying I don’t think everyone would be so cooperative with the cops.’

The OHP in May 2024 said it was not investigating Presgrove’s death as a murder, but didn’t explicitly rule out manslaughter.

Jack by 2024 told friends he was torn between Presgrove being hit in the back of the head by a passing truck’s mirror or falling, or being pushed, out of a pickup truck.

Suspects in the latter include a group of party guests Presgrove’s friends called the ‘Texas boys,’ who were friends of friends and not well known by the core group.

‘I’m 50/50 between a semi and the Texas boys… maybe Noah asked them for a ride or something… but even if something happened with them it was accidental,’ he wrote.

‘But man I just can’t see any kids accidentally killing someone and not calling for help.’

Jack elaborated to the Daily Mail that he didn’t believe they had any reason to kill him or cover up his death.

‘Those were good kids too, if that’s what happened they would have called and tried to get help for him. They didn’t really know Noah so they wouldn’t have beef with him,’ he said.

Medical experts have dismissed the truck mirror theory as not explaining Presgrove’s extensive torso injuries, and believed much more damage would have been done to his head.

Falling onto his head from a vehicle is considered more plausible, but Dr Stuart Fischer, an internist doctor with extensive experience in emergency medicine, said he would likely have more significant leg injuries.

Jack is convinced Presgrove died where he was found, and wasn’t moved from a different location and dumped to cover it up.

‘Everyone is saying he was moved after he died, it’s impossible, I’ve seen it with my own eyes the spot on the road where the back of his head hit the ground, there was a tooth found there, his necklace was all destroyed there,’ he told the Daily Mail.

The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation called Presgrove’s death ‘suspicious’ in the days after his body was found. 

A town ready to explode

As the months wore on without answers, Presgrove’s friends and family, along with concerned locals, grew more restless.

Multiple Facebook groups have thousands of members discussing his death around the clock with hundreds of comments a day.

Many of them are angry at the friends who were at the party, and their families, whom they accuse, largely without evidence, of covering up a crime.

Some of them were even sent threats, to which they responded angrily, and many times confronted their accusers on social media – sparking messy, all-in threads of condemnation.

‘This place is a volcano waiting to erupt,’ one concerned local told the Daily Mail.

‘There’s a lot of p**sed off people… I’m worried our small communities are going to erupt in violence.

‘It has potential to be very explosive… I don’t want to be anywhere near that fire when it pops off.’

Locals feel OHP released its statement, its only comment on the case since the first weeks after Presgrove’s death, saying the case was not a murder investigation in an attempt to calm tensions.

Presgrove’s family also tried to put a lid on the angst after the autopsy report was released.

‘We understand people’s frustration with the pace of the investigation,’ his aunt Robyn Smith wrote on Facebook.

‘This is not an open and shut case. According to some accounts, there were as many as 40+ people in and out of that party. That makes for a large pool of people to question. 

‘A lot of the stories being told do not align with one another, so having to decipher who’s telling the truth is a whole other matter in itself.’

Smith said she had full faith that investigators were doing their best and dismissed rumors they were being paid off as ‘ridiculous’.

‘A team of 15 investigators is working on this case, along with the OSBI,’ she claimed.

‘No matter how well-off some may represent themselves to the community, there is not enough money in those pockets to buy off that many officials or two agencies.

‘Please be kind, and remember, these are the men and women trying to find resolution for Noah’s family and friends.’

Presgrove’s injuries

The Oklahoma Chief Medical Examiner Eric Pfeifer ruled Presgrove died of ‘multiple blunt force injuries,’ but how he got them was ‘undetermined.’

His autopsy report released on May 13, 2024, detailed extensive injuries to the teen’s upper body, including 10 broken ribs, serious skull, neck and spine fractures, internal bleeding, brain and organ damage, and cuts and grazes all over his body.

There was one extensive skull fracture running across his head, ‘splitting the middle base of skull into two,’ and two smaller ones, with police investigators describing his head as being ‘caved in.’

He had about 20ml, or 0.68oz, of blood pooled inside his head from a brain bleed, damage to four parts of the brain itself.

There was also air in both his cranial cavity and spinal cord, extremely rare conditions only caused by massive head trauma. 

Both lungs were punctured and he had internal injuries to his heart, spleen and stomach and internal bleeding of at least 1,550ml – about 3.2 pints.

A man Presgrove’s size has about 12.6 pints of blood, and would generally die after losing half of it – though as little as a third can lead to death.

The skin on the left side of his scalp was torn off to the bone and a clump of hair and skin was found in the middle of the highway.

‘Additionally, a clump of hair was observed on the right buttock without blood or tissue,’ Pfeifer wrote.

Both his upper and lower teeth were broken ‘with few fragments and found inside the mouth’ and others strewn across the road several feet from his body.

He was bleeding out of his ears and had a cut on his lower lip and one on his tongue.

Presgrove’s C1, C2, C6, C7 vertebrae were fractured to varying degrees and C1 was displaced – indicating a seriously broken neck of the same kind that people who are executed by hanging suffer.

He had road rash on his upper back and abrasions from grazes on his left shoulder, left arm, left side of torso, and both buttocks.

Other grazes were on his left eyebrow, corner of the left eye and left cheek, left ear, right neck, and behind his right ear.

Presgrove had healed abrasions and scabs on his nose, both hands and knuckles, left foot and heel, round healing ulcer on right thigh – all of which predated the injuries from that night.

Pfeifer wrote that there were ‘no vehicle parts or debris observed on the scene,’ indicating Presgrove was almost certainly not hit by a car. 

‘He was naked and was only wearing unmatching shoes. There was a pair of shorts found several feet from the decedent and was reported to be his,’ Pfeifer wrote.

‘Additionally, there were three pieces of a white metal chain as well as part of a tooth present several feet from the decedent.’

Pfeifer noted there was ‘a drawing in black ink of a stick-figure person on the side of the right thigh.’

The shorts he was wearing were undamaged, despite the grazes on his buttocks, and the slip-on shoes had grass and other debris lodged in them.

Presgrove had a blood alcohol level of 0.14, but no drugs in his system. 

Confronting photos of police chalk outlines showed his teeth were found scattered across the highway, some a dozen feet from his body.

Farther away still is a spot of blood – the only blood found at the scene despite the extensive injuries all over his upper body.

Presgrove’s family sues his friends

Presgrove’s family lost patience after years of near-silence from police and sued four of his friends and three parents for wrongful death in June 2025.

The $75,000 lawsuit claimed the teenager was ‘beat to death by one or more of the defendants’ and dumped on the road, but did not specify who allegedly did it.

The lawsuit left open the possibility that the alleged beating wasn’t meant to kill him, and included ‘unidentified individuals’ among the defendants.

‘Either intentionally or accidentally, the defendants killed [Presgrove],’ the lawsuit claimed.

‘Although the death may have been unintended, hosting the party and beating of [Presgrove] was intentionally, malicious, and in reckless disregard of [his] rights.’

Presgrove’s family insisted his death was ‘not caused by being hit by a motor vehicle.’

Jack was singled out as who allegedly bought the alcohol Presgrove drank, which the complaint argued made him partly culpable for his death.

He allegedly bought the booze from Napoli’s convenience store in Marlow, Oklahoma, also named as a defendant and accused of selling alcohol to a minor.

Avery, Carter and Logan, were added to the complaint as they hosted the party.

‘The party was a civil conspiracy… to furnish alcoholic beverages to underaged and intoxicated individuals, such as [Presgrove], over the course of several days,’ the lawsuit claimed.

They were accused of providing Presgrove with alcohol ‘even after he was already intoxicated’ and breaching their duty of care by doing so.

Presgrove’s autopsy report found he had a blood alcohol level of 0.14. 

Jack’s father Caleb Newton was accused in the lawsuit of allowing Presgrove to drive or ride on an ATV, which flipped and allegedly injured him. 

He was eventually dropped from the lawsuit about a year later.

Avery and Carter’s mother Stevie Howard was named in the suit because she owned a trailer next to the house that was used in the party, as was her father Johnnie Trout Wilcoxson, who owned the property but was not present.

The lawsuit offered no evidence that Presgrove was beaten to death, let alone by anyone at the party, and none has emerged since his body was found – other than the nature of his injuries.

The seven-page complaint included some of the known facts in the case, including the ATV accident, and an argument just before Presgrove vanished.

‘Toward the end of the party, defendants Jack Newton and Avery Howard were seen verbally fighting with [Presgrove],’ it claimed.

All defendants hired lawyers, including Avery, Carter and Logan retaining prominent attorney Clark Brewster. 

All the accused parties denied liability in their initial responses to the lawsuit and entered affirmative defenses claiming Presgrove caused his own death.

Then in October 2026, the first page of the first amended complaint leaked online, revealing startling new allegations and dragging three additional people into the mystery.

‘On the morning before Noah’s death, defendant Avery made one or more statements about harming or killing him,’ the document claimed.

The updated complaint’s claim about Avery’s statement may be a reference to a police interview with another of Presgrove’s friends who was there that night, Kaden Pressy.

‘Noah fell asleep on the ground with Logan [Jernigan] on Saturday night – they didn’t do anything, but when I woke up I remember Avery saying to Logan “if you did anything, I was gonna kill y’all” but they laughed it off,’ Pressy told investigators.

The first page of the amended complaint claimed her statements foreshadowed Presgrove being beaten as part of a premeditated plot to kill him.

‘Hours later, defendants provided Noah with alcohol past the point of intoxication. Then defendants stood by as multiple boys jumped him,’ it continued.

‘The defendants pursued Noah on a side-by-side off-road during the period before he was found near Highway 81.’

Who the ‘multiple boys’ who supposedly attacked Presgrove were is not explained in the first page of the amended complaint. 

Along with dropping Caleb Newton, the amended complaint added Brylan and Jasmine to the defendants, along with Christopher Payette.

Payette was driving along US 81 and passed where Presgrove’s body was found about 5.30am – minutes before another truck driver called 911 at 5.43am. 

A tiny image of the first page of the first amended complaint was included in a recent public filing by Presgrove’s family after it was leaked.

The Daily Mail obtained a clear copy of the same page that included the new allegations. 

A major goal of the lawsuit is to compel deposition testimony from the defendants and witnesses in the hope of finding out how Presgrove died. It remains unclear if that will ever happen.