What Noah Presgrove’s Best Friend Says Happened the Night Before He Died (Exclusive)

In the dark of early morning, by the glow of headlights, Jack Newton says he came upon his best friend’s naked body laying on the side of Highway 81 in Oklahoma on Sept. 4, 2023.

He slowed down and got out of his truck.

“It just seemed like he was drunk, passed out on the side of the road when I first seen him,” Jack, 19, recalls of Noah Presgrove's mysterious death in an hourlong interview for PEOPLE’s latest cover story, on newsstands Friday.

Hours earlier, Jack and Noah had been celebrating a friend’s 22nd birthday at a home outside Terral, Okla., about a mile’s drive away.

Now, Noah — wearing only mismatched slip-on shoes, with a pair of undamaged white shorts nearby — was dead, with a cracked skull and fractured spine.

For more on Noah Presgrove's life and death and his family's search for answers, pick up this week's issue of PEOPLE or subscribe.

“He was laying on his side. His knees were kind of pulled up to his chest a little,” says Jack, noting that the 19-year-old who had graduated high school just months before was “right by” the white traffic line off the rural roadside.

In more than a dozen interviews with law enforcement, partygoers, friends and family and others at the scene, many details of Noah’s death — what he looked like when his body was found and what happened after — are still uncertain.

Much of the truth of his final hours is still clouded by competing accounts, speculation and rumor, or the sheer fact that police have not yet finished their investigation.

But records and recordings reviewed by PEOPLE confirm some details, including that Noah had walked away from the party that he and Jack attended before he died and that he was first spotted by passing drivers on Highway 81 before 6 a.m. local time on Sept. 4.

Authorities, who soon arrived to the scene, initially thought the case could be a horrible road accident — a hit and run — but soon their suspicions darkened.

A silver-plated chain necklace from Noah's grandmother, which he wore every day, lay scattered in pieces near remnants of a tooth.

The base of his skull was split in two. And an 8-inch head wound had peeled part of his scalp to the bone. His later autopsy revealed that he died of “blunt force injuries.”

Tyler Hardy, a local trucker and one of two 911 callers, was already at the scene when Noah's best friend stumbled upon him that morning.

“You know this kid?” Jack recalls Hardy asking.

“He's my best friend,” Jack said.

Hardy had to pull Jack away from the friend he had known since preschool and grown close to in middle school. The two were almost always together, Jack says.

Back in his truck that morning by the highway, Jack says, he called his dad — with whom he had planned to go with on a fishing trip later that morning — to instead meet him at the scene. 

Afterward, “it's kind of blurry,” Jack says of the minutes that followed.

Much of that Labor Day weekend had been spent with a close group of nine friends who grew up together. They drank, they went hog hunting in Jack’s ATV side-by-side and, by that Sunday night, the party had ramped up with a social media blast, extending to a group of teens and young adults from Texas who were strangers to Noah and most of the others, according to Jack. 

Jack says he went to bed at 2 a.m. local time on Monday, Sept. 4. Before getting in bed, he says he put his thermal rifle in his truck and squirreled his ATV keys in the bedroom so no one would shoot or drive drunk. 

But an hour or so later, Jack says, Noah grabbed the keys and a group took off on his ATV, which tipped over, although no one was visibly injured. 

Other partygoers who declined and ignored interview requests later told Jack that Noah became disgruntled after two female friends apparently, separately rebuffed him. 

“I'm going to go cool off,” Noah said, per the version of events later relayed to Jack, who nonetheless acknowledges that there are conflicting recollections.

Of one such disputed detail, he says, "Everybody I asked will tell you a different story."

Noah had changed into Jack’s wrestling shorts — white with splotches of red and gray — after the ATV incident and he slipped on two mismatched shoes as he walked out the door around 3:30 a.m., Jack tells PEOPLE.

"Their house is damn near half a mile from the road. Nobody expected him to walk to the highway," Jack says.

When Noah did not immediately return, another partygoer — whose father declined an interview request on her behalf — posted on social media that he was "missing" along with two spiral-eyed emojis.

(In a later explanation of her post, she wrote on Facebook that she had posted that way “not knowing that the worst was gonna happen. not knowing noah would never come back.”)

In the hours after Noah was found, several other partygoers — who learned of Noah’s death when Jack briefly returned to the Terral home with the news — also went to the scene, Jack says.

He says he waved them off before they neared Noah’s body, telling them that they should go back.

Hardy, one of the 911 callers, as well as a local sheriff who was on the scene that morning and Jack — among others — all described Noah as being naked and say that Jack moved the shorts soon after arriving to find Noah's body.

Jack says he tossed his shorts in his truck to make sure they did not blow away with the passing traffic. 

Ultimately, the shorts were folded beside Noah.

Both Jefferson County Sheriff Jeremie Wilson and Jack say that Oklahoma Highway Patrol — which took the lead on the investigation, given where Noah's body was found, but have said little as their probe continues — were made aware of the change.

In the passing months, as more and more locals speak up, pushing for answers in Noah's case, more and more people across the country have also started to follow coverage of the strange case.

That has fueled interest in getting to the truth that Noah's family says they appreciate. It has also fed rumors and theories that they find unhelpful — even painful. Jack has been a target of some of this.

His dad, Caleb Newton, says in an interview with PEOPLE that Jack is now feeling the double loss of his best friend and the community where he grew up.

“He feels like they went and turned their back on him,” says Caleb. “Just over all these lies, and accusations.”

Both Caleb and Jack say they are skeptical of foul play. State police have said they aren't investigating the death as a murder, but some law enforcement officials and outside experts have raised questions about the details of how Noah was found.

That has only put more attention on the party that Noah attended before he died.

"I can't believe that any of them could even know that something happened and not say something," Caleb says, pushing back on concerns of a serious crime.

"There was no evidence of any kind of a beat up, no evidence of any kind of the big stuff that     everybody's talking about. It's just all made up," he says.

Jack, for his part, believes Noah may have fallen victim to a freak accident at the end of a rowdy night.

"To me, it seems like he asked somebody for a ride [and] fell out of the back of the truck. ... I don't know. Something like that," Jack says.

He says the “random people throwing around my name and running it down” who have voiced skepticism about his story “really don’t hurt my feelings too bad.”

“It’s just the people that have known me and Noah forever and were around,” he says. “That’s the people that get to me.”