NOAH PRESGROVE'S MYSTERIOUS DEATH : We Need to Find Out What Happened'

A YEAR AFTER THE 19-YEAR-OLD WAS FOUND NAKED AND DEAD BY THE HIGHWAY AFTER A PARTY, HIS FAMILY SHARES DETAILS FOR THE FIRST TIME ABOUT THEIR SEARCH FOR ANSWERS

- EMILY PALMER

As the sun rose over rural Oklahoma on Sept. 4, 2023, father and son Victor and Dailen Presgrove drove along Highway 81, anxiously bracing for what they were about to find. Less than an hour earlier, they had gotten a call with devastating news: 19-year-old Noah Presgrove, Victor's son and Dailen's little brother, had been found dead on the side of the road outside Terral.

Now Victor and Dailen were looking for his body. "We didn't know exactly where he was, so we'd go up each hill unaware if we were about to see Noah," recalls Dailen, 24.

"That drive felt like a year." They soon met authorities where passing drivers had found Noah lifeless by the highway. A silver-plated chain necklace from Noah's grandmother lay scattered in pieces not far away, near remnants of a tooth. Blood soaked into a sheet that covered his body.

As Noah's autopsy would later confirm, the base of his skull had been split in two and his spine was fractured. An 8-inch head wound peeled part of his scalp to the bone. Even more alarming, he'd been discovered naked, wearing only a pair of mismatched slip-on shoes, his undamaged shorts first seen about 30 yards away.

The gruesome scene was about a mile from a packed house party where Noah had been with friends the night before. Law enforcement initially thought that he could have died in a road accident, possibly a hit-and-run. But as authorities examined the site more closely, their suspicions darkened. "We've had other people hit before, and we can re-create it and make it make sense," says Jefferson County sheriff Jeremie Wilson, who was one of the first responders that day.