Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - SHOCKING AUTOPSY: Who or What Killed Noah Presgrove

Episode Date: June 8, 2024

The autopsy of Noah Presgrove is released and for the first time in the history of Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan, Joe is going to issue you a warning for what you are about to hear. Noah Presgrove is at a birthday, end of summer, labor day party with friends all weekend. But something happened Sunday night to cause Noah to leave the party by himself. He is found the next morning at 5:53am, alone, dead, on the side of a rural highway. He is naked except for a pair of shoes, but one of the shoes isn't his, it belongs to a guy asleep at the house where the party took place. The "friends" he has known all of his life aren't talking. His brother sees teeth scattered near his brother's body and pieces of chain. Who or What killed Noah Presgrove? Will the autopsy help answer the question? Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart   Transcript Highlights 00:00:08 Introduction: Growing up in rural area  00:03:10 Talk about List of Injuries  00:05:17 Discussion of group dynamics  00:09:12 Discussion of what happens to clothing   00:12:27 Talk about social media evidence  00:16:11 Discussion of internal injuries  00:20:26 Discussion of injuries cased by falling out of a truck   00:24:14 Talk about skull fractures  00:28:32 Discussion of brain fluid  00:32:52 Discussion of broke teeth  00:36:03 Talk about animals and body on road  00:37:52 Discussion of cervical injuries  00:40:00 Discussion of abrasions  00:41:47 Talk about being hit by car  00:43:59 Discussion of data  00:44:17 Conclusion; After the autopsy we still don’t have answers See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. When you're a kid and you're growing up out in the heartland, rural areas, you know what you spend most of the time doing, other than probably working on property that your parents have. You go to school. There's no city, really, to go into and hang out at. You rely heavily on your friends for entertainment.

You entertain one another, actually. And those forms of entertainment can involve any number of things. Sitting around a bonfire, having a few beers, even under a hitch. Riding around in the back of your buddy's pickup truck. Just going to spontaneous parties at someone's home. But, you know, even with all of that going on, you still, there's a level of safety and familiarity you have with that location that you grow up in. Today, we're going to discuss a death that I guess now has been under investigation for near about a year. It's a death that occurred out in rural Oklahoma. It's a death involving a young man who

was found, his body was found broken and bleeding on the side of a road wearing shoes and nothing else. But the shoes that he was wearing didn't match. As a matter of fact, one of the shoes belonged to someone else. Today, we're going to talk about the death and autopsy of Noah Pressgrove. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Dave, we've got a whole bunch of rural. Yeah, we live in a rural area, not that dissimilar from Oklahoma, where Noah Pressgrove grew up. He's 19, graduated from high school, and he's at an end-of-summer Labor Day 22nd birthday party, all rolled into one on this weekend.

The reason we're talking about Noah Pressgrove's death is because his autopsy has come out. Police are still not investigating this as if it's a murder, and yet it doesn't fit into a hit and run. And the best that police can come up with is that maybe he fell out of the back of a truck. The injuries don't match that either. So today we're going to talk about the death and the autopsy of 19-year-old Noah Pressgrove. But before we do that, I want to say a very quick hello and thank you to Jennifer Williamson Ward. She is a friend of Cheryl McCollum, and she sent a message to us about this story. And Jennifer, I have to tell you, I mentioned it to Joe. And in the world that we live in, in terms of on the air, radio and TV and what have you, and podcasting,

this is a story that Joe has covered extensively from Court TV to Nancy to News Nation, I'm sure. I mean, if there's a crime-related show, they ask Joe, especially when it deals with something along the lines of what we're getting ready to talk about, and that is the death of a 19-year-old man who, by the way, I've never seen a laundry list of injuries so severe when there was not a murder investigation. That's the thing, isn't it? Because the injuries are so extensive that he was presenting with at autopsy, I would imagine that the pathologist that's doing the examination is scratching their head and they're thinking, well, where do I begin? You know, because when they would have gotten this young man's body, there would have been some

external manifestations as we know that there were, relative to injuries that could be evidenced externally. But I can almost see, because I've had the look on my face, I can almost see the look on everyone's faces when they started doing post-mortem x-rays on this kid's body. And it would have been so glaringly obvious, the trauma that this kid sustained. Whenever you have a case like this, Dave, where you've got so much trauma, it's important. And it's almost like a game plan. You know, if you go into a game, a big game, there's so many moving parts. You need to have enough data on your side to understand what you're going to do. Because if you just go into a case like this randomly without doing any

kind of pre-investigation or a pre-examination of the body, an external examination, which includes x-rays, you're bumping around in the dark and you're going to miss something. So if you can go in with this idea of, okay, this is what the radiographs are showing me. This is the information that has come in from law enforcement that were at the scene. This is information that they have gotten through interviews. You need to be armed with this because, Dave, this is so complex. It's so intertwined. And you don't know where one group of injuries stops and the other one starts. And the big thing here is sequencing.

How did all of this occur? Because there's so much here. All right. So when a situation arises like this, in this particular case, where there had been a party taking place over a weekend and Noah's body is found at 5. three a.m. on September the fourth. They were dealing with last September. His body was found on the side of the road. He was curled up in the fetal position naked, except for, as you mentioned, the mixed match shoes. One was not even his passing truck driver saw him and reported it called nine one one.

Now, Noah has a brother that had heard. I don't know how. Okay. But there was a lot of, you know, calls are being made early on. Of course, the truck. It's a small town and news travels. He knew something had happened that Noah was whatever. And he goes to the scene.

Now, by the time his brother gets there, Noah's body has already been covered. But he said he could recognize Noah from the shape of his body on the ground. He was in the fetal position, and the blood had soaked through the sheet that they had covering him. And just so you know, that would be the sheet, whatever, laying on top of his body, on top of some area that had blood. Because if it was I tend to think of seeping as going down, not up. But his brother was talking about certain things that he saw at the scene. And I in coming to this blind because I didn't want any kind of preconceived notions as to what had taken place. Gotcha.

And his brother said, I saw teeth. Teeth. And I go, okay, he's finding teeth. And a pair of shorts are folded near him. He's nude. He's in a fetal position. I find teeth near his body, body his teeth and a pair of shorts folded near his body so here we go joe it's just before six in the morning police show up they

start doing the investigation all right he's been at a party during the course of the weekend the injuries to this young man we're to have to go through them very carefully because they are so extensive. Yes, they are. And I've never seen this in reporting these types of, and we've reported plenty, situations where there was a weekend party, a fight breaks out, a couple of guys gang up on somebody. There are some bad tales to tell like that this is if this is one of those there were probably 10 different on their own fatal injuries to noah pressgrove that tells you how bad this was yeah it was and you know before we step off into the world of the injuries you got to talk about the scene this is a a rural isolated area. And the one thing that sticks out to me, first off, the comment of the brother. I've worked cases and it's well documented in all of the literature. You can see this when you have motor vehicle accidents, there are people, you know, famously, okay, let me start off here.

There's always, there's this, uh, precept that is always put forward that anytime a pedestrian is struck by a vehicle, they're automatically knocked out of their shoes. I've had so many people tell me that over the years, it doesn't always happen. You know, it's, it's kind of like, you know, uh, people talking about suicides and the weapon being found away from the body. Like the body is supposed to be holding the weapon. That doesn't happen every time. Just like people are not always knocked out of their shoes. That doesn't always happen.

But I can tell you what does happen many times with clothing in particular is that clothing if you think about the spinning of the tires when a body is struck a pedestrian is struck many times if the body is captured beneath the undercarriage of the car the clothing will be twisted and ripped off of the body dave it's not what the brother said he said noah was nude in aal position, and we'll get to the teeth in a second, but his undershorts were found on the road folded. Now, I don't know what had happened prior to Noah's brother arriving at the scene, but if I hear that somebody's underwear are folded and I don't know how to validate this. I don't know if the police have remarked about this and explained this, this thing that the brother was witnessing. How do,

how do undershorts wind up getting folded? Particularly if you're thinking, well, maybe they got ripped off in the accident or whatever it is that happened because whatever happened involved a tremendous amount of impact. I don't, I'll put it this way. I've actually worked parachute failures where the parachute failed to deploy that have fewer fractures than this kid had. Wow. Let that sink in just for a second. I mean, and that's, um, and the reason is, is pretty, is that when a body is impacted, it's not generally impacted on multiple locations with this amount of force to generate underlying fractures.

Okay. I'll just kind of plainly say that. So that leaves us with a great big kind of question mark here, wondering what was the generator? How did this happen? How did he wind up in this isolated area? And was there something more that may have occurred at a party that Noah attended, or did it occur as he was leaving the party and wound up at this location? Hey, Dave, you ever heard that saying it says uh and it varies from time to time uh nothing good happens after 11 p.m or nothing good happened after midnight yeah after midnight i know noah was at a party and kind of in and out the details details are a little bit murky. A little? Yeah, a little.

And I was being kind. Yes, you were. And so there was a party. We know that. And it was a celebratory event. Yeah. And there were many young people there. Can you kind of run this time? Because timing is everything in this case. Can you kind of break this top because top timing is everything in this case can you kind of break this down for us and give us an idea the murky part of it is that there was social media being fed pictures and and what have you of all of the partying that was going on a girl turned 22 somebody they all grew up with we hit this in the first segment about being close-knit everybody knows one another when everybody knows one another you have a tendency to have uh smoldering problems you know you got an issue with somebody and maybe you're not tight with

them you're tight with these people but now you're in together and i just don't like that guy you know never have hated him in third grade you know he wiped a book around me or something you know yeah yeah it stays with you in a town like in an area like this. But this party was going on. It was a it was, well, first of all, Labor Day weekend. It was a 22nd birthday party for a girl. It was an end of summer party for the adults. Most of these kids were out of high school. Noah had graduated a year previously, and he was looking at a future that included possibly joining the military. That's what he was considering. So they gathered together at

this party over a weekend. Now, my first thought when I saw it was, this is one of those kind of keggers that you go to on a Friday night, and it kind of goes on all weekend. You party, you listen to music, and the next day you wake up whenever and pretty much go right back to it. But that's not what happened. It was a multi-day event that took place. But the partiers left, or at least Noah left and went home and cleaned himself up and then went back the next night. During the course of this weekend, Labor Day weekend event, Noah did have a dis well backup Noah and five other guys, six guys rode this big ATV. Um, it's referred to as a, a Ranger vehicle, an ATV Ranger vehicle, Noah and five other people are on this Ranger vehicle and they had an accident. It wasn't bumping into a car. it wasn't bumping into a car it

wasn't bumping into a pole it wasn't hitting a curb it was a rollover incident first of all these atv ranger vehicles are not cheap they are adult toys yes and it was an adult toy that got rolled over the way they make it seem is that no Noah might have been the driver of said vehicle. I don't know if that's the case. But one thing we do know is that it was bad enough that when he came up dead, that was the first thing people thought, hey, he got hurt in this ATV accident. He did get hurt, but not bad enough that it required him to go to the hospital or anything. He was hurt, but he went back to the party.

You know, Dave, when you have events and you mentioned a rollover event and these Ranger vehicles that come in a couple of different configuration, you have two-seater or four-seater, they make this thing sound like it's like a four-seater. They've got roll bars on them. So if the thing tips over and they're talking about a are walking, talking, fully oriented to time and space. And eight hours later, they die. And that's because something along the way was clipped internally, generally some type of smaller vessel. And it's a slow bleed internally.

And then all of a sudden, it's classic. What you begin to see is that suddenly they become very sleepy, speech becomes slurred, they become disoriented. And then the next thing you know, they're out cold on the ground and they've got this kind of, it's almost like a death rattle they have because they're slipping off into a coma because they're losing blood. And the oxygen level, the supply to the brain is dropping precipitously. And it's a horrible thing to witness.

This does, in fact, happen. So we can't completely discard that possibility that it's, you know, we talk a lot about the totality of injuries that an individual sustains. It might not be just singularly a one-time event. It could be a combination of events. And I'm sure that that's what the pathologist was trying to consider in this. And I think it's important to note that it was a bad enough accident that it was brought up that he was not hurt because it's the assumption that if you say, well, he wasn't hurt, he actually must have shown

some injury but not bad enough to quit you're 19 you're 10 feet tall and bulletproof for crying out oh oh my gosh yeah and look if you here's the thing uh and this is kind of kind of cool scientifically if you sustain let's say you sustain an injury and maybe you don't think much of it at the time, it hurts upon initial impact, what your body begins to do, there's a trauma response in your body. So let's just say you have a broken rib. You get popped in the side and you don't know that necessarily that this is some kind of fatal or lethal event, but yet it hurts. But it's not something that is going to get you down your knees, all right? Right.

But what the trauma response in the body is, is that first off, it's going to hemorrhage. And secondly, it's going to swell. And we know for a fact that swelling or the ecchymosis that surrounds that damaged tissue, Dave, it takes a prescribed amount of time for that to happen. So when you're examining somebody in the morgue and you're looking for these injuries and trying to interpret them, one of the things you're going to look for are these little breadcrumbs to say, okay, you know what? This injury might be older than these other ones that occurred at the time of death. First off, if something occurred at the time of death, it's not going to be presenting with the amount of swelling, for instance, that something that had happened hours before or a day before may be

experiencing. It'll look completely different. How do you make sense of all of this? When you have, say, for instance, old injuries that are now potentially being coupled with new injuries that are discovered at autopsy, maybe these things are even recognized out on the scene. How is it that you're able, as a scientist, to delineate between what is older and what is newer? Sometimes those answers are not as obvious as you might think that they are. I don't normally do this sort of thing on this podcast, but I got to tell you, I got to give you a word of warning. What we're going to talk about right now is even by body back standards is kind of graphic, but it has to be stated. And I'm going to try in my own little way to interpret and give you an idea of what might could generate these types of injuries. And in many cases, there are multiple ways that these types of injuries can be generated. But you go

The police theory that he was thrown out the back of a truck that was moving, Joe, I want you guys to pay attention to these injuries because you're not going to find, if you were thrown out of the back of a truck, you're going to have road rash over your legs. You're going to have arms. You're going to have a lot of those times. And I'm saying that because I've been thrown out of the back of the truck, not by friends throwing me out. We actually were being stupid and I fell. And I know the injuries I had and we weren't, you know, they were all over.

And my legs took the brunt of it for the most part. Knees, feet, ankles, what have you. And he does not have those types of injuries that that actually match up to someone that was pitched out of the back of a truck. I'm just saying that because as we break these down, that's what I went into it thinking happened. And I went, how do they even say that out loud? Take a look at this list, Joe, that you're going. And I want you to explain just right off the bat, 10 broken ribs. With 10 broken ribs is really something that, and you have to think about the orientation of these fractures.

Are they all married up like on the horizontal plane? Do they kind of match up as you go down the rib cage? You know, like when you're going down the fifth rib and the fifth rib, are they both concurrently fractured? And does it approximate the same anatomical location? If that's happening, then maybe you took a full-on impact of a motor vehicle striking you in your chest and you're on your knees. Probability of that is very low because you would have other associated things that you would find with that. The other thing that you get with fractured ribs is something that folks may or may not have heard of before.

It's called a flail chest. And what happens is that when your ribs are fractured, they're almost free floating within your chest cavity and you'll get multiple lung punctures and your lungs and your plural spaces, which are the area around your lungs, begin to fill with blood. So you have that going on in and of itself with the ribs. And to get 10 broken ribs, Dave, is something that I don't know that you would get from a single event. You might get that from a single event, but there's not going to be this many other associated injuries. Just think about it. Just think about it. If you were a kid and you were in a treehouse, okay,

and you fell out of the treehouse, you're going to impact on one location on your body, maybe the back of your head, maybe a shoulder, maybe your hip. Maybe you're going to bend your knees under you, you know, Lord help you, and land on both of your knees from a height. But that's a single point of impact. Dave, we've got stuff here that at least implies that there are like multiple impacts with a significant amount of force because you're talking about underlying fractures, Dave.

And that's why I said earlier that there are at least 10 injuries that on their own with nothing else could have been fatal. Go through the rest of this show. I'm going to sit here and shut up because I, I really, for the life of me, um, I think,

I think the thing that is frustrated by what the police have said, it is frustrating. I think probably no way this didn't have to happen by jump falling out of the back of a truck that did not happen. Well, maybe if you fell out of the back of a truck multiple times is what I think probably... There's no way this didn't happen by falling out of the back of a truck. That did not happen. Well, maybe if you fell out of the back of a truck multiple times is what I think I'd like to say. Yeah. Let me hop back up and try that again. I didn't break my leg this time. Come on. I know. And that's kind of what you're thinking about. And I know that they're thinking about this. The ME is certainly thinking about this. Is it possible to generate? And listen, again, I go back to this idea that they've left the scene unclassified. You know, they have not classified it. And that's that's a big you know, that's a big piece to this because, you know, the cops can say basically whatever they want to say about what they're seeing at the scene. However, if the ME is not signing off on this thing with a particular classification, that gives me an indication that they're still

wanting more information, that they're scratching their heads over it. I think probably the thing that jumps out the most is that, you know, they talk about this one central impact to the skull, which, Dave, I got to tell you, it sounds like, and it's apparently a very, very extensive injury, but it sounds like a single impact that is almost being described as a, it seems to me is almost like a depressed skull fracture, which means that it's not, the skull is not just simply fractured. You fracture like if you have a boiled egg and you kind of crack it and it creates like this kind of curvilinear manifestation. Whereas we're talking about if you take that egg and press it in, have you ever done that with a boiled egg? You press it in on the sides and it literally depresses and it's almost like a ring that it creates and it kind

of spider webs out. That kind of sounds like what they're talking about. That sounds like a depressed skull fracture. How do you get that? Well, I guess you could get it if you hit just right on the back of your head on the road. But you know, I've seen depressed skull fractures with baseball bats, hammers, pipes. I've seen people with depressed skull fractures that have been pistol whipped. Not saying any of that happened, but just that injury alone, that injury alone,

just standing all by itself is a lethal injury because, dude, when they opened up his skull, there was a copious amount of blood that poured out of the cranial vault. What does that mean to you? Well, it means that you've got multiple vessels within the skull that are fractured. And if you like that one, I got one that's even worse. And this is something I have never mentioned on this podcast. If you

will put your fingers adjacent to your external ear canal on both sides, if you put your index fingers on both sides, imagine drawing a line through the floor of your skull right there. Noah has got what sounds like a hinge fracture. And the hinge fracture literally involves going all the way across the floor of the skull internally. And these fractures are amazing when you see them. You get an idea of how much force is involved. When you remove the brain, after you've taken the skull cap off where this other fracture would have been, when you remove the brain, that's where all this blood is coming from. You grab the top of the skull up by the forehead where you've made your incision and the back

of the skull. You can actually open the skull along the floor of the skull and it looks like a giant mouth like moving like this. And it goes all the way across many times, either anterior or right across the foramen magnum, which is where your spinal cord dumps down into your spinal column. And I've seen it involved in both locations. And it's like this gaping maw that's in there. Dave, you have to have so much force in order to generate that insult alone that it gives you pause.

Hinge fractures don't occur all the time. And when you see them, it's like if you're standing there with a forensic pathologist, they'll say, oh, my God, we've got a hinge fracture. It's like, okay, you get the photography person over there. You're going to want to take a picture of this. Not that you wouldn't otherwise, but the pathologist is going to want like a tremendous number of photographs taken of this because this is a significant finding. You look at that in and of itself, all of that head trauma is just absolutely amazing. Now he's got brain damage in a sense that it's traumatically related. So you'll have both indwelling hemorrhage within the brain itself.

There's external damage to the brain. There'll be a lot of blood, coagulated blood, more than likely, that is just resting on the surface of the brain and certainly within the dura sac, which if you think of the dura sac that encompasses the brain, it's almost like a placenta. Matter of fact, it actually, if you take the dura mater and lay it alongside a placenta, it looks a lot like that. It's kind of a protective bag that encases the brain itself. And it's a wash in spinal fluid. It kind of lubricates the brain because you wouldn't want your brain just sitting inside your skull because the edges are so rough in there. And so the dura acts almost like a shock absorber for the brain. So you would have a tremendous amount of blood contained in there.

There were four separate areas of trauma on the organ, the brain itself. And not to mention this trauma, we talk about cerebrospinal trauma. Okay, you hear doctors talk about this a lot. So Noah's skull and brain were not just impacted, but also his spinal cord. You get down to the C1. You've got multiple cervical vertebra. And the C1 is what classically we refer to as the atlas if you think about the titan atlas from greek mythology atlas is that gigantic being that is holding up the earth and the reason they call c1 the atlas is because it is literally where the skull is resting and it's supporting from a skeletal standpoint is supporting the skull that the c1 dave in this case is actually displaced okay so

it's been it's been knocked out for a a lack of a better term in layman's in layman's terms it has been displaced so it's kind of of knocked out of alignment. As a matter of fact, some have described this as a displacement that might be consistent with what you would see in a judicial hanging, which leads to death. So when people talk about the snapping of a neck, when they're falling from a height, the C1, C2 is what's impacted. And, you know, when people are, uh, are in judicial hangings, that's what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about anything self-inflicted here. The goal was, uh, that they would fall from such a height that it would displace the C1 and C2, which are a critical level in the spine that if, if those things are

displaced, it's incompatible with life. okay, because it impacts those basic functions that are required just for the autonomic nervous system to fire, you know, like keeping your heart beating and doing, you know, respirations and all that other regulatory stuff. So that has been impacted, for lack of a better term. We've got what they found was a skin on the left side of the scalp had been torn away off of the brain, off the, forgive me, off of the bone. So it means it's been ripped from the skull itself, which again is kind of a friction-related type of event. I guess you could say that somebody could have traumatized him individually, but most of the time you see something like that. That's the idea of the dynamic of somebody perhaps rolling down the road. And it goes from an abrasion to a tearing laceration where it's kind of ripped through.

And as the police began to work this scene where Noah's found, it wasn't just teeth, you know, that were out there at the scene. And we'll get to that in just a second. But, you know, Dave, they actually found a clump of hair and skin away from the body in the middle of the road, which means that's probably hair that is attached to a portion of the scalp that was torn away. It was laying there. Again, that requires a tremendous amount of force. You've got the buttock, the right buttock is traumatized. Here's another thing that, you know, we talked about teeth, both upper and lower. So, you're talking about your maxillary teeth, which are your upper teeth, and your mandillary teeth,

which are embedded in your jaw, your lower teeth. They're broken, and they're in fragments, and you've also got upper and lower teeth that are strewn across the roadway. Dave, you know, when people talk about having trauma to the mouth and they lose a tooth, what do they say? They generally don't say, I got my teeth knocked out. They say, I got a tooth knocked out. Brother, he's got teeth that are fractured and missing, okay, that are strewn about. Now, we have to think that, again, this could be a high-velocity impact event where he may very well have fallen on the ground. But, you know, my thought was, well, it obviously involves the head,

more than likely that depressed area in the skull that generated the initial injury. But now you've got teeth that are coming out of his head. It sounded to me like a curb stomp. That's what it sounded like. Yeah. I don't know. But with fractured teeth, it's certainly, I'd like to know, I think one of the things I'd be very interested in knowing, and I don't necessarily have this information i would like to know what kind of

trauma existed relative to the exterior of the mouth like the lips and the jaw uh now he did have a cut on his lip and he had a cut on his tongue but can i back up to something yeah absolutely sure okay you mentioned the clump of hair that was found in the middle of the highway well there was a clump of hair that was observed on the right buttock without blood or tissue and it was specific to that it said without blood or tissue. Yes. And it was different than the clump of hair that was found in the middle of the road. It was like this, that he was tortured, the hair, and it was put there for a reason.

Yeah. You know, and who's to know what the dynamic of this event is? He is nude so how how how would hair from the head presumably and they don't specify what the nature of the hair is i mean it might be pubic hair i guess yeah could be hair off of his chest i have no idea but they do make a point of that where they're talking about a clump of hair clump of hair gives you an idea that something has been pulled loose, right? That it has been taken out at the root, perhaps, or broken off superior to the root ball, and that this has been left behind. How does that hair, and I think a question I would ask as a forensics guy, I'd want

to validate that hair. I'd want to know, was it Noah's hair? First off, was it human hair? Was it an animal? We're talking about out in the wild. And there's animal hair on the roadway. You know, I'd argue that. I'd say, well, how do we know the provenance of the hair? You know, what's the point of origin? What species is it? Is it his? Does it look like his hair color? Is he missing hair that had been torn out? Is it possible that an animal could have done it? I don't know. That's just it. And to this point, I don't see any evidence that an animal has been involved in this.

I would just like to know the origin of it. All we can do in forensics is document what we see there. It's hard to really extrapolate further than that. But it is certainly an interesting finding. I don't know that I've ever seen that kind of phraseology before. I haven't, and I read these things all the time. And I have done stories where hair was pulled out. It just sounds like the most painful thing.

Of course, on this list of things, I'm still beyond the pale Joe, but he's bleeding out of his ears. Yes. He's got teeth thrown everywhere. Bleeding out of the ears is consistent with the hinge fracture, by the way. And you would probably also, yeah. And you'd probably, if looking closely, you could probably see cerebral spinal fluid. You know how when you're a kid and if you take a first aid class, they tell you to look for a clear fluid coming from the ears. That's what I'm talking about.

So you'll get this kind of commingled with hinge fracture. You'll see kind of a commingled cerebral spinal fluid along with blood. And it's got kind of a straw color to it. As a matter of fact, pathologists will describe it as having a straw-like appearance, the color of straw, and it's tinged with blood. So that would come from that area. And again, that goes to something has happened that has compromised the structural integrity of the spinal column with this displacement. And brother, it wasn't just his C1.

You know, I failed to mention that he's got a fractured C2, which obviously is just beneath the C1. And C6, we're going down the column now. C6 and C7 were also fractured to varying degrees. And there's multiple features on each one of these things. You've got these horns that are on it. And there's various anatomical features where it can be fractured again you know vertebral bodies just in and of themselves are one of the most they are a very robust bone and when i say that they're thick um they they're there for i mean think about what they're protecting man i mean they're protecting your spinal column.

It's just like the skull, particularly on the back, is very robust and thick. It is that way for a very specific reason. So you've defeated, the impact has essentially defeated this naturally occurring structure within the body that is meant to take a tremendous amount of punishment. So how, you know, how does it account for all of these other insults that he has all over his body? And again, you know, look, I've got to state full disclosure here, you know, he's got what they're describing as grazes, there's abrasions, and you've got them on multiple surfaces, which many times are associated with rollover injuries. So if you've got scrapes and abrasions,

and they're kind of what they call wraparound injuries, that's traditionally what you're looking for. So if the vehicle is spinning, the body will be spinning, okay? And you hit asphalt, gravel, you're going to get this horrible dynamic where you'll have these abraded and they'll be linear many times. And they'll cut a wide swath. I'll never forget, I had a cousin of mine who was literally run over by a dump truck when he was working on a levy in Louisiana. He had the tire tracks across his, he's got this great picture of tire tracks running across his chest.

You can actually, his tandem wheels and you can see it and he survived, but he had all those. And I remember from when I was a little kid, we were amazed. I mean, we thank God that he survived. He wound up becoming a preacher.

Makes sense actually. Yeah, it does. And you could see all of that it does and you could see all survive that one yeah you could see all these abrasions and that's it was the tire tread itself left an impression but it's also abrading the skin as it's rolling over you take that and you think about the dynamic of a body flying through the air and spinning makes contact with a rough surface like a roadway you're going to get those same kind of abrasions dave well joe now there were other things that were on his body that they were able to determine

had were in various stages of healing uh abrasions and scabs and what have you but with have you ever seen like have you ever seen anything like this where there wasn't some type of mechanical failure with a car a boat uh being thrown from a building any number of things this is ostensibly a kid a 19 year old young man leaves a party after an argument and is by himself and ends up with all these injuries police are saying they're not investigating it like it's a murder uh there by the way for those who think there was a hit and run involved uh to cause these types of injuries there was no uh there's nothing indicating there was a hit and run there were no uh parts of a car no skid marks nothing nothing and look one other thing i'm sorry i don't mean to

to jump on you here or not jump on you, but interrupt you. I got you. When you think about a pedestrian being struck by a vehicle, there's something that we refer to as bumper marks. So if you're talking about being struck in the thigh or the lower legs, you'll have a definitive line. And think about a bumper on a car. It makes sense. It's two parallel lines like this running in the horizontal plane. They're striking you if you're standing erect. And you can clearly see that many times.

Dave, I've even seen grill impressions on bodies where I saw, I can't remember, I think it was a Buick, where I saw the Buick emblem literally pressed into the skin. And so that's a classic finding, and grill marks too, a classic finding of a pedestrian being struck by a vehicle. But you're not hearing this. And so I think that's their default position is falling out of the back of a truck as opposed to being struck by a vehicle that is going through the person. I don't mean through literally, but, you know, where you've got a static individual standing in the middle of the road and they're struck by a vehicle, those injuries are going to look different. And this is almost – and here's another theory I really wonder, Dave.

All of these injuries that he sustained, I'm wondering, I'm really wondering, if he had come out of a vehicle, wound up on the roadway, was there another vehicle that passed by that didn't see him in the middle of the night and then ran over him again? That has happened. It's a dark road. He was not found until the next morning. There was a trucker that found him, you know, there in the light of day. I think that all of these things have to be factored in to the totality of these circumstances to try to understand it. And then there's the specter that people keep talking about. I don't know how to either validate it or invalidate it. I'm in the same position, I think, that the medical examiner is

in just talking. Of course, I don't have that level of responsibility here, but that's the pieces of the puzzle for the ME to put this thing together so that they can actually come up with a ruling where they're going to say, okay, this was an accident, this was a homicide, or however they're going to come down on this thing. I wonder what it will be that will push them toward that decision, because I got to tell you, Dave, all this data, all this data, the timeline, the information about an ATV accident that is still remains a mystery. And the combination of all of these injuries and their documentation feels as though we still don't have any more answers than when we first started.

I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.