Authorities Reveal Suspicions from Strange Scene Where Noah Presgrove’s Body Was Found (Exclusive)

Jeremie Wilson has been the sheriff in Jefferson County, Oklahoma, since 2017 — and worked in law enforcement since 2005 and served in the military before that — and he says he’s never seen anything quite like the death of 19-year-old Noah Presgrove.

Wilson was one of the first authorities on the scene early on Sept. 4 after two 911 callers reported seeing Noah's body while driving down Highway 81 just outside of Terral, Oklahoma.

“It just — it looked awful odd,” the first caller, who identified himself only as Tyler, told the dispatcher, according to audio of the call that was released to PEOPLE.

Undersheriff Jimmy Williams was soon sent out; Sheriff Wilson joined him not long after, along with members of Terral’s volunteer fire department, who helped secure the scene.

Nearly a year later, it remains unclear how Noah died.

His autopsy report, obtained by PEOPLE in May, states that he was killed by “multiple blunt force injuries” — including serious head and neck wounds like vertebral fractures — but that the cause of those injuries is “undetermined.”  

A state police probe is ongoing. Authorities said in May that they weren't looking into the death "as a murder.” 

Some key details have been publicly confirmed including that, before he died, Noah was partying with friends over the Labor Day weekend not far from where his body was found on Highway 81.

But the lack of answers, more than 10 months later, has roiled the rural community where Noah lived and fueled speculation online.

Vigils and protests have been held. A banner hung outside a business in neighboring Duncan, Oklahoma, urges passersby to speak out. “YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO ME SO WHY DON’T YOU HELP?” it declares alongside a photo of Noah in his high school football uniform. 

Noah’s family has taken it upon themselves to also dig for clues in a mystery that both law enforcement and outside experts agree appears confounding. 

Did he die accidentally or in a crime? What happened to his clothes — and what brought him to the side of the road before dawn that day?

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“What I saw from the very beginning, I personally did not believe this was a hit-and-run,” Wilson, the Jefferson County sheriff, said in an interview, while also making clear that he was speaking only in his capacity as a first responder in September because the state immediately assumed jurisdiction, given that the death was reported on the highway.

What Wilson saw that morning was this, he says: Noah was naked and on his back, with “a couple of teeth laying next to his body.” According to his autopsy, he wore only a pair of mismatched shoes, and a pair of white printed shorts were nearby that showed no "observable damage."

“There was blood on the scene, but not as much as there should have been, let me put it that way,” Wilson says. “Even if you were hit by a passenger car by highway speeds that night … there should have been a lot more blood.”

What’s more, he says, "There was not a lot of road rash like he slid, he got hit at 65 miles an hour … That was not the case.” (The autopsy does state that Noah's body suffered some road rash-like damage.)

Also odd, according to Wilson, “There was no vehicular parts.”

Dr. Priya Banerjee, a board-certified forensic pathologist and outside expert unconnected to the case, also said the lack of car debris was unusual in the case of a hit-and-run.

“I can't look at the injuries and say I know exactly how these occurred and that's why it's undetermined,” she says. “Was it a car accident, like a hit and run? Was it an intentional strike with a vehicle? Did someone beat him up and dump him? There's so many possibilities, and nothing about the injury pattern will help narrow it down further.”

But, of the blood at the scene, she notes that Noah's neck and skull injuries "would mean a rapid death and thus yield little bleeding."

“If you hit a deer, which deer get hit out here all the time, always deer and cows — I don't care if you got hit by a semi, there is a piece of a fender. There is a piece of the under fender. … There is a headlight, there is a mirror, there is always something," Wilson says.

Despite searching through “half a mile of the ditches,” investigators “found nothing,” he says.

Authorities did recover some, but not all, of a silver chain that Noah often wore. Wilson calls that another oddity.

“This whole situation didn’t sit well with me,” he says, noting the unusual inability of the scene itself to provide more insight.

“We've had people hit before, and we can recreate the scene and make it make sense, make it fill the gaps,” the sheriff says. “We've had unattended deaths, suicides that the evidence always gives us the facts. We can always backtrack and recreate 99% of the scene.”

But not here.

Sarah Stewart, a spokesperson for Oklahoma’s Department of Public Safety, has said that the probe continues into Noah’s death and, citing “standard procedure,” declined to “release documents or information” on the case until the conclusion of the investigation.

Noah's family, for their part, says they've been told different things by different law enforcement and say that Wilson previously viewed the incident as a hit and run, despite the irregularities. (The sheriff did not respond to follow up questions.)

Undersheriff Williams, in a separate interview, says he only alerted the fire department for their initial assistance on Sept. 4 rather than put out a broader alert that would have summoned more law enforcement and potentially created chaos. “I didn't want a mad house down there,” he says.

In addition to the firefighters on the scene, as well as members of the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, some locals were also present for a time, according to Wilson. Noah’s best friend, Jack Newton, was among them as was Jack’s dad, Caleb.

Jack tells PEOPLE that he basically stumbled upon the scene that morning as he was heading out to go fishing with his father and grandfather. He stopped when he saw a semi-truck on the road by Noah: “I saw lights so I started slowing down. … I could see Noah's body in the headlights out of the truck.”

Tyler Hardy was one of the two 911 callers that morning and remained on the scene after reporting Noah’s body. Hardy says the truck driver, the other caller, returned and waited as well.

“When Jack pulled up, he walked to the body and I walked over and asked him if he knew who it was,” Hardy says, “and then I pulled him away from the body because he's talking about being his best friend.”

Like the sheriff, Hardy says “there really wasn't blood there.” 

He describes seeing Noah’s body in a slightly different posture than Wilson did (a discrepancy that appeared in other interviews as well).

“It was, I’m not going to say the fetal position, because it wasn't, but his legs were bent and his back was towards the road," Hardy says. "His legs were towards the ditch, and his head was kind of just laid there right along ... His whole body was laid along the white line, but he was laying on what would've been his right side.” 

Around 7 a.m., Noah’s big brother Dailen Presgrove, a teacher, got the call that he’d been found dead — and Dailen and their dad, Victor Presgrove, headed out along Highway 81 to go to the scene.

“We didn’t know exactly where he was so as we were going, we’d go up this hill not knowing if we were about to see Noah on the side of the road,” Dailen told PEOPLE in a previous interview. “That drive felt like a year.”

The months since have been difficult, too. 

“This is not some Lifetime movie for us,” says Noah’s cousin Ashley Chadwick. “This is an everyday reoccurrence. I feel like we probably have not properly grieved, because it's been such this ongoing cycle of trying to figure this out.”

But Noah’s loved ones have rallied around his memory, describing him as a fun, fearless athlete and easygoing young man who planned on joining the military. 

Says Chadwick: “We can't rest until he's able to rest.”