Crime Fix with Angenette Levy - Autopsy Raises Questions in Death of Teen Found Naked in Road

Episode Date: May 20, 2024

The autopsy for Noah Presgrove determined what caused the 19-year-old’s death but didn’t answer the question of how he died. Presgrove was found dead in a road in Terral, Oklahoma last September. He’d been at a party with friends the night prior. The medical examiner released the autopsy report for Presgrove this week but it raised more questions about his death. Law&Crime’s Angenette Levy looks at the report with crime scene consultant Alina Burroughs in this episode of Crime Fix — a daily show covering the biggest stories in crime.If you’ve used Incognito mode in Google’s Chrome browser, find out if you have a claim in a few clicks by visiting https://www.incognitoclaims.com/crimefix/?v=cf1Host:Angenette Levy  https://twitter.com/Angenette5Guest:Alina Burroughs  https://www.instagram.com/alinaburroughs/CRIME FIX PRODUCTION:Head of Social Media, YouTube - Bobby SzokeSocial Media Management - Vanessa BeinVideo Editing - Daniel CamachoAudio Editing - Brad MaybeGuest Booking - Alyssa Fisher & Diane KayeSTAY UP-TO-DATE WITH THE LAW&CRIME NETWORK:Watch Law&Crime Network on YouTubeTV: https://bit.ly/3td2e3yWhere To Watch Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3akxLK5Sign Up For Law&Crime's Daily Newsletter: https://bit.ly/LawandCrimeNewsletterRead Fascinating Articles From Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3td2IqoLAW&CRIME NETWORK SOCIAL MEDIA:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawandcrime/Twitter: https://twitter.com/LawCrimeNetworkFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawandcrimeTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/lawandcrimenetworkTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@LawandCrimeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of this Law and Crimes series ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. The autopsy results are in for a teenager in Oklahoma, but still there are so many questions about the death of Noah Pressgrove. We dig into the autopsy report with a crime scene investigator. Thanks for joining me for Crime Fix. I'm Anjanette Levy. Noah Pressgrove was 19 when a truck driver found him on a highway in Terrell, Oklahoma, just before 6 a.m. on September 4th of last year. Noah was naked and only wearing unmatching shoes. A pair of shorts, believed to be Noah's, were found nearby but undamaged. Also found nearby, a metal white

chain and part of a molar tooth. What wasn't found, there were no vehicle parts or debris at the scene. The autopsy report says that further investigation revealed that the decedent was at a house party and drinking on September 3rd of 2023. Then he rode an ATV Ranger vehicle with several men that had a rollover accident. The decedent was alive following the incident and returned to the party where he got into an argument with his girlfriend. What happened after that remains a mystery. The autopsy found that Noah had several blunt force injuries to his head and his neck. There were fractures to the skull and swelling to the brain. He had abrasions, which are big scrapes on the left side of his face,

including his neck, cheek, and ears, and broken lower and upper teeth. The pathologist wrote, there were abrasions on the right back of the head, behind the right ear, and sub-adjacent posterior right neck. There was bleeding coming out from the right and left ears. The upper and lower teeth were broken with few fragments found inside the mouth. There were white abrasions on the midline mucosa of the upper lip. Noah also had wide scrapes on his back containing black material and abrasions on his arms and his backside. There were lacerations on his lungs and fractures to his ribs. The pathologist ultimately found, in consideration of the circumstances surrounding

the death, autopsy examination, and toxicology result, the death of Noah Alexander Nichols is due to multiple blunt force injuries. The decedent was found naked, wearing only a pair of shoes on the side of a highway on the morning of September 4, 2023. There were no vehicle parts or debris observed on the scene. At this time, what transpired on the body was found on the road having multiple blunt force injuries is unknown. Therefore, the manner of death is deemed undetermined. We now know what caused Noah's death, but we don't know how he died. This is a law and crime legal alert. Google Incognito tracked users browsing data without their knowledge. Mass Tort Alliance, one of our

legal sponsors, is helping users like you file for compensation because Google misled users about the privacy of its Incognito browser. If you've used Google incognito anytime since 2016, you can start your claim by answering less than 10 questions. Log on to incognitoclaims.com slash crime fix. I want to bring in somebody to help me discuss what we know about the autopsy results for Noah Pressgrove. She's Alina Burrows. She is the host of Crime Scene Confidential on ID. She's also a forensic consultant, a former crime scene investigator, a CSI, real life CSI. So Alina, welcome. Thanks so much for coming on. This is somebody, a young guy, 19 years old, a healthy guy who suffered a lot of significant trauma to his head and his neck and his upper

body. So there's a lot going on with this autopsy and the results. A lot. Yeah. This is definitely one of those puzzles that you have to kind of follow down one path until it doesn't make any sense and then pivot and go down a different path. Certainly a lot of trauma. One thing that I found interesting, and we need to couch everything we say with the fact that we are looking at the autopsy report. We're looking at what the pathologist found. We have not seen photographs of the scene. We have not been to the scene and visited it. So we haven't seen what they are seeing. But one thing that I found interesting was the fact that, very sad, Noah is found on the highway. He has abrasions on his back, wide scrapes is what they basically call it with black material in there. He's naked. He has two different shoes on. He had some writing on his body, probably from the party, broken teeth. I mean, there's a lot of

damage here, but there's no car debris. So does that rule out the possibility that this could have been an accident where he was hit and a vehicle took off, a hit and run, something like that? Yeah. The injuries that we're looking at really, to me, rule out hit and run, something like that. Yeah. The injuries that we're looking at really, to me, rule out hit and run for a couple of reasons. One, when we look at the evidence, we're looking at the fact that he is wearing the two mismatched shoes, which the first thing everybody's going to be questioning is why is he wearing two mismatched shoes? It looks like he had exchanged shoes with a friend at the party. As an investigator, the first thing that piques my interest, why the mismatched shoes? And if he's wearing mismatched shoes,

there's another set of mismatched shoes somewhere. But through a little bit of research, it looked like this was a fun act with a friend. But one of those shoes is a slip-on style speed laced shoe called a Hey Dude shoe, right? That would come off very easily. So that's our first clue. The second thing is that those shoes don't appear, according to the autopsy report, to have any damage on them. So that rules out dragging, right? We would expect to see some abrasions or some wear and tear on the shoe if that had occurred.

So we would expect that he would have lost the shoe or we would see some damage on the shoe. Then when we look at the injuries that he'd incurred, if we see a hit and run, if he'd been walking on the side of the road and he would have been struck by a vehicle, we would expect to see some fractured femurs, legs, pelvis that were fractured. And what we lack here with his injuries, although they're extensive, is we don't have leg fractures,

we don't have broken ankles, we don't have fractured pelvis. All of his injuries really appear to be torso, head, neck. They're all pretty much waist up. Now, we do see some abrasions. We see some minor injuries waist down, but really everything is concentrated from the waist up. And when we lack those injuries or those damages on the shoes, that takes this in a very interesting direction. I think it's interesting too. And the fact that it's so confusing to me that he has all this injury to his body. He's naked. He's wearing two different shoes, yet there's a pair of shorts undamaged nearby. So I'm left to wonder, did somebody dump him there? Was he placed there somehow? But then we have the black material in the scrapes on his back, which makes it sound

like to me, well, he had to have been scraped somehow. We know that he was in the ATV accident, but was still able to return to the party, according to what's written in the autopsy report. So we have undamaged shorts. He's naked except for shoes, but he had been in this ATV incident, but was still able to go back to the party. So it's very confounding to me. Does it seem like somebody dumped him there? The shorts would look like those shorts are undamaged and we see that he does have abrasions on his buttocks. So the shorts being undamaged, right? Meaning they don't really appear to have, from the autopsy report, blood on them. They

don't appear to be scuffed up or scraped in some way. So then we know he's not wearing them at the time of the incident. So is he walking and holding them, and then something happens to cause him to drop those shorts, or is he dumped and then somebody throws those out along with him? Those are our two options that we're looking at. With these injuries, we would expect to see a significant amount of blood with the skull fractures that we're dealing with. So if this scene lacks blood, that is something that would lead law enforcement to consider whether or not this was what we call a dump site, but also we have to take into consideration the substrate and if that's something that the ground

would saturate, if they were able to find an area where that blood could potentially be. Now, the autopsy report does say that there's black material embedded in some of the injuries. That to me sounds more like he has been pressed or had some type of crushing injury that has embedded substrate asphalt type material. I'm sure they're going to collect that and want to test that. The other thing that's interesting to me is there is a piece of the autopsy report that seems to indicate some type of pattern injury at the rear shoulder, linear and circular pinpoint types of injuries. I don't know, I haven't seen photographs, but when we're talking about a pattern injury on a roadway, the first thing that comes to my mind is, are we talking

about a tire? We seem to have a majority of injuries that are on the left-hand side of his body. We have a left lung that's collapsed. We also have rib fractures. When we're looking at beating type of trauma, which has to be a concern or consideration in this case, most ribs that are fractured from beating are lower rib cages, right? That's people that are punching in like gut type shots. His ribs that are fractured are very high. We're talking ribs that are normally protected by your shoulder blades, your clavicles. Those aren't shots that people take when they're punching or beating somebody. Those are corresponding ribs that are fractured on the right and the

left and they're about the width of a tire. Are we looking at somebody who is passed out on the roadway and a car rolls over the body, crushing those ribs, leaving that pattern type injury, embedding asphalt into the back as it rolls his body over? That was going to be my next question to you. My thinking was, is he in the road and he's run over by a vehicle? The vehicle maybe doesn't see him. It mentions how it was not a well-lit road and somehow he's in the road and he gets run over by a vehicle or hit by a vehicle that isn't aware that they're hitting somebody or something like that. I don't know that. That's speculation on my part. And again, we haven't seen these pictures. They say that his manner of death, and there are five manners of

death, just so the listeners and the viewers understand. We have natural, accidental, homicide, suicide, and undetermined. This is undetermined because they don't have enough information. They know what caused his death, all of this blunt force trauma to the head and the neck, but they don't know basically the how. Did somebody do this intentionally? Was it caused by another person? We don't have that information. So where does the investigation go from here? Because I can't imagine that it's over. There has to be something else. There has to be more going on. Well, keep in mind that when a body is found nude, they are automatically going to look towards, is sexual assault a possibility? I don't think that that's the case here,

but the fact that he is found naked is going to be a cause for concern. They're going to take penile swabs, anal swabs. They're automatically going to do fingernail scrapings and clippings just to see if there are any signs of struggle. So I'm sure that those are being sent to a lab just to see if there are any type of foreign DNA profiles. They're going to wait for those to come back. So no, an investigation is not over because it's undetermined. They're going to be conducting interviews. I would be hard pressed to think that there is somebody out there that does not have some information. You do not hit something of that size if that were the case, not seeing the scene or any photographs, but if there is a pattern injury on this child, somebody out there knows

they hit something. Yeah. It's, um, it's confounding. And I, I think we need more information too, about how did he leave the party? Was it after the argument with the girlfriend or was it sometime after that? Like, was he walking away from the party? How far away was the party? There's still a lot of questions that we don't have the answers to, but we'll look into it further. And we appreciate your time, Alina. It's a really sad case. Just poor kid. It's very sad. It's awful. Yeah. Yeah. And I know the family just wants answers. Yeah, most definitely. And they deserve them.

Thank you so much, Alina Burrows, for coming on. Thank you for having me. And that's it for this episode of Crime Fix. I'm Anjanette Levy. Thanks so much for being with me. I'll see you back here next time.