January 30, 2025 • 44 mins
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?
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
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Body Backs 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.
(00:32):
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 age,
riding around in the back of your buddy's pickup truck,
(00:53):
just going to spontaneous parties at someone's home. But you know,
even with all that going on 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
(01:14):
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
(01:35):
didn't match. As a matter of fact, one of the
shoes belong to someone else. Today we're going to talk
about the death and autopsy of no Oppress Grove. I'm
Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body Bags Dave. We
got a whole bunch of rural Now.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
We live in a rural area. I'm not that dissimilar
from Coklahoma where Noah press Grove grew up. He's nineteen,
graduated from high school, and he's at an end of
summer Labor Day, twenty second birthday party all rolled into
one on this weekend. The reason we're talking about Noah
press Grove's death is because his autopsy has come out.
Police are still on investigating this as if it's a murder,
(02:18):
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 nineteen
year old Noah press Grove. But before we do that,
(02:39):
I want to say a very quick hello and thank
you to Jennifer Williamson Ward. She is a friend of
Cheryl McCullum, 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 terms of on the air radio and TV
(03:00):
and what have you and podcasting, this is a story
that Joe has covered extensively from Court, TV to Nancy.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
To News Nation. I'm sure.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
I mean there's a crime related show, they asked 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 nineteen 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.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
That's the thing, isn't it. You know, 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
(03:50):
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 or relative to injuries
that could be evidenced externally. But you know, when I
can almost see because I've had to look on my face.
I can almost see the look on everyone's faces when
(04:11):
they started doing post mortm 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 day, 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
(04:33):
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 bumped around in the dark and you're going to
miss something. So if you can go in with this
(04:55):
idea of Okay, this is what the radiographs are showing me,
this is the information that has come in from law
enforcement that we're 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 where one group of injuries
(05:19):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
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 five point fifty
three am on September the fourth, now we're dealing with
last September. His body was found on the side of
the road. He was curled up in the fetal position,
(05:50):
naked except for as you mentioned, the mixed match shoes.
One was not even his Passing truck drivers saw him
and reported it called nine to 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 a truck it's a.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Small town, and news travels.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
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, you know, 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
(06:36):
know that 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
(06:59):
want any kind of preconceived notions as to what had
taken placetcha. And his brother said, I saw teeth, teeth,
and I'm okay, he's finding teeth and a pair of
shorts are folded.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Near him.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
He's nude, he's in a fetal position. I find teeth
near his 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
(07:36):
this young man, we're going to have to go through
them very carefully because they are so extensive. Yes, 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
(07:59):
that this is if this is one of those, there
were probably ten different on their own fatal injuries to
Noah Press Grove that you.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
Have had this, 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 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.
(08:34):
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 precept that is always
put forward that any time 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
(08:57):
like you know, people talking about suicides and the weapon
being found away from the body, like the body is
supposed to be holding the weapon every 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?
(09:18):
Is it 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 a fetal position,
(09:40):
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.
(10:00):
I don't know if the police have remarked about this
and explained this thing that the brother was witnessing. How
do undershorts wind up getting folded, Particularly if you're thinking, well,
maybe the got ripped off in the accident, or whatever
it is it happened. Because whatever happened involved a tremendous
amount of impact, I don't I'll put it to this way.
(10:24):
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 and the reason is, it's pretty simple, is
that when a body is impacted, it's not generally impacted
(10:47):
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, you know, a great, big,
you know, kind of question mark here, wondering what was
the generator, how did this happen? How did he wind
(11:09):
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? Dave you ever heard
(11:43):
that saying? It says, and it varies from time to time,
nothing good happens after eleven PM, or nothing good happened
after midnight. I know Noah was at a party and
kind of in and out. The details are a little
bit murky, a little, yeah, a little and I was
(12:04):
being calm and so there was a party. We know
that and it was a celebratory event and there were
many young people there. Can you kind of run this
top because tom Tommy does everything in this case, Can
you kind of break this down for us and give
us an idea.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
The murky part of it is that there was social
media being fed pictures and what have you of all
of the partying that was going on. A girl turned
twenty two, somebody that all grew up with. We hit
this in the first segment about it being close knit.
Everybody knows one another. When everybody knows one another, you
have a tendency to have smoldering problems. You got an
(12:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
You know.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
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 twenty second 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
(13:18):
at a future that included possibly joined 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
you know, it kind of goes on all weekend.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
You party, listen to music.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
The next day, you wake up whenever, and you know
pretty much go right back to it. But that's not
what happened. It was a multi day event that took place.
But the part of yours 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 as well.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
Back up.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Noah and five other guys, six guys rode this big ATV.
It's referred to as 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 pole, it wasn't hitting a curb.
(14:25):
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 Noah might
have been the driver of said vehicle. I don't know
if that's the case, but one thing we do know
(14:48):
is that it was bad enough that when he came
up dead, that was the first thing people thought of, 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
(15:08):
went back to the party.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
You know, Dave, when you have events and you mentioned
a rollover event, and these Ranger vehicles they come in
a couple of different configurations. You have two seater or
a 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
rollover event, just because there's a rollover doesn't mean that
(15:32):
you're not going to sustain injuries. And I have seen
I have seen people, Dave, that have been involved in
motor vehicle accidents. Where they get up and they are walking, talking,
fully oriented to time and space, and eight hours later
they die. And that's because something along the way was
(15:55):
clipped internally, generally some type of smaller vessel, and it's
a slow bloe 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
(16:17):
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, that it might not
(16:40):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
Think it's important to note that it was about 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.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Too quick.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
You're nineteen, you're ten fee telling bulletproof for grying out lot.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
Oh oh my gosh. Yeah. And look if you here's
the thing, 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,
(17:26):
there's a trauma response in your body. So let's just
say you have a broken rib, you get popped in aside,
and you don't know that necessarily that this is some
kind of fatal or lethal event, but yet it hurts.
But it's something it's not something that you know is
going to get you down on your knees, all right.
(17:49):
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 echymosis 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
(18:12):
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
(18:35):
had happened hours before or a day before may be
experiencing it'll 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
(18:58):
you're able as a scientists 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
(19:28):
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 bodyback Sanders 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.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
But you get the police theory that he was thrown
out the back of a truck that was moving jail.
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 gonna have arms,
You're going to have a lot of those type And
I'm saying that because I've been thrown out of the
back of the truck. I'm not by friends throwing me out.
(20:11):
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, these feet, ankles, what
have you. And he does not have those types of
injuries that actually match up to someone that was pitched
out of the back of a truck. I'm just saying
(20:31):
that because as we break these down, that's what I
went into it thinking happened, and I went, how did
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, ten broken ribs.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
With ten 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 to
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
(21:11):
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.
(21:34):
It's called a flail chest. And what happens is 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
(21:57):
you have that going on in and of itself with
the ribs, And to get ten broken ribs, Dave, is
something that I don't know 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.
(22:21):
Just think about it. If you were a kid and
you were in a tree house, 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 your 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 had
(22:44):
stuff here that at least implies that they're like multiple
impacts with a significant amount of force, because you're talking
about underlying fractures, Dave.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
And that's fine, I said, earlier that there are at
least ten injuries that, on their own, with nothing else,
could have been fatal. Go through the rest of this show.
I'm going to sit, hear and shut up because I really,
for the life.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
Of it, I think I think the thing that is.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
It's frustrated by what the police have said.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
I it is frustrating. I think probably no way.
Speaker 2 (23:17):
This didn't have that happened by jump falling out of
the back of a truck.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
That did not happen. Well, maybe if you fell out
of the back of the truck multiple times, is what
I think.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
I'd like to say. Yeah, let me hope back up
and try that again. I didn't break my leg this time.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
Come on, I know. And that's that's kind of you
know 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
(23:50):
because you know, the cops can say basically whatever they
want to say about what they're seeing at the scene.
How 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
(24:11):
heads over. I think probably the thing that jumps out
the most is that, you know, they talked about this
one central impact to the skull, which Dave I got
to tell you. It sounds like, and it's a it's
apparently a very very extensive injury, but it sounds like
a single impact that is almost being described as a
(24:34):
It seems to me is almost like a depressed skull fracture,
which means that it's not the skull is not just
simply fractured where you fracture like if you have a
Bowld egg and you kind of crack it, you know,
and it creates like this kind of curvelinear, you know, manifestation,
whereas we're talking about if you take that egg and
press it in, if you've ever done that with a
bold egg, you press it in on the sides and
(24:56):
it literally depresses and you have it's almost like a
that it creates and it kind of spider whebs 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.
(25:19):
I've seen people with depressed skull fractures that have been
pistol whipped. I'm 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
(25:42):
blood that poured out of the cranial vault.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
What does that mean to you.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
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 podcas cast. If you
will put your fingers adjacent to your external ear canal
on both sides, If you put your your index fingers
(26:09):
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,
so that and these fractures are amazing. When you see them,
(26:31):
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
(26:53):
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 foreime and 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, that created that you have
(27:17):
to have so much force in order to generate that
insult alone that it's it gives you pause. Okay, Hine.
Fractures don't occur all the time, and when you see them,
it's like, you know, if you're standing there with the
forensic pathologists, they'll say, oh my god, we got a
(27:37):
hinge fracture. You know, 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
(27:59):
brained damage in a sense that it's traumatically related. So
you'll have both in dwelling 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
(28:20):
the dura sack, which if you think of the dura
sac that encompasses the brain, it's almost like a placenta.
A matter of fact, it actually if you take the
dura matter and laid alongside a placenta, it looks a
lot like that. It's kind of a protective bag that
(28:41):
encases the brain itself. It's a wash and 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 blod contained in there.
(29:02):
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 his Noah's head and brain were
(29:23):
not a skull and brain were not just impacted, but
also his spinal cord. You get down to the sea one,
you've got multiple cervical vertebra and the C one is
what classically we refer to as the atlas. If you
think about the Titan Atlas from Greek mythology, Atlas is
(29:47):
that gigantic being that is holding up the earth. And
the reason they calls C one the atlas is because
it is literally where the skull is resting and supporting
from a skeletal standpoint, it's supporting the skull that the
C one Dave in this case is actually displaced. Okay,
(30:08):
So it's been it's been knocked out for a lack
of a better term in Layman's. In Layman's terms, it
has been displaced. So it's kind of knocked knocked out
of alignment. As a matter of fact, some have described
this as a displacement that might be consistent with what
(30:29):
you would see in a judicial hanging, which leads to death.
So if you you know, when people talk about the
snapping of a neck when they're falling from a height,
the C one C two is what's impacted, and you
know when people are are in judicial hangings, that's what
I'm talking about. I'm not talking about anything self inflicted here.
The goal was that that would fall from such a
(30:51):
height that it would displace the C one and C two,
which are a critical level in the spot that if
those things are displaced, it's incompatible with life, okay, because
it impacts those basic 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
(31:14):
and all that other regulatory stuff. So that that has
been impacted, for lack of a better term. Uh, 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,
(31:35):
which again is kind of a friction related type of event.
You know, 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.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
And it's it's it's it goes from an abrasion to
a tearing laceration where it's kind of ripped through. And
as the police began to work the scene where Noah's found,
it wasn't just teeth. You know that. We're 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
(32:16):
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,
(32:39):
we talked about teeth, both upper and lower. So you're
talking about your maxillary teeth, which are your upper teeth,
and your mangellary 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
(32:59):
across the roadway. Dave. You know when 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. Right, Brother, he's got teeth that are fractured
and missing, Okay, that are strewn about. Now we have
(33:23):
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 a head more than likely that depressed area
in the in the skull that generated the initial injury.
But now you've got teeth that are coming out of his.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
Head like a curb stomp.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
Well, 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,
(34:08):
like the lips and the jaw.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
Now, he did have a cut on his lip, and
he had a cut on his tongue. But can I
back up to something that 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,
(34:34):
and it was specific to that 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.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
Yeah, you know, And who's to know what the dynamic
of this event is. He is nude, so how with
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
(35:15):
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 are 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
(35:36):
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 point of origin? What species
is it? Is it his? Does it? Does it look
like his hair color? Is he missing hair that had
(35:59):
been torn out? Other than the sibility?
Speaker 2 (36:02):
Animal could have done it?
Speaker 1 (36:03):
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. You know, all we can do in
forensics is document what we see there. It's hard to
really extrapolate further than that, but it is it is
certainly an interesting finding. I don't know that I've ever
(36:27):
seen that kind of phraseology before that.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
I haven't, and I read these things all the time,
and I have done stories where a hair was pulled out,
you know. It just sounds like the most painful thing.
Of course, on this list of things, I'm still beyond
the pale Joe. But the he's bleeding out of his ears, yes,
got teeth thrown everywhere.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
Bleeding out of the ears is consistent with the hinge fracture,
by the way, and you would probably also, yeah, and
you probably if looking closely, you could probably see cerebral
spinal fluid. You know how they when you're a kid
and if you take a first A class, they tell
you to look for a clear fluid coming from the ears.
That's That's what I'm talking about. So you'll get this
kind of co mingled with hine fracture. You'll see kind
(37:13):
of a commingled cerebral spinal fluid along with blood, and
it's got kind of a straw color to it. 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 from that area,
and again that goes to something has happened that has
(37:35):
compromised the structural integrity of the spinal column with this displacement.
And brother, it wasn't just as C one. You know,
I failed to mention that he's got fractured C two,
which obviously is just beneath the C one and C six.
We're going down the column now. C six and C
seven were also fractured to varying degrees. And there's multiple
(37:58):
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, they they're therefore, I mean, think about
what they're protecting, man, I mean, they're protecting your spinal column.
(38:21):
It's just like the skull, particularly on the back, is
very robust and thick. It's 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,
(38:44):
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 a 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, multiple surfaces, which many
times are associated with rollover injury. So if you've got
(39:08):
scrapes and abrasions and they're kind of wrap what they
call wrap around injuries, that's traditionally what you're looking for.
So if the if the vehicle is spinning, the body
will be spinning, okay, and you hit asphalt gravel, you're
going to get this horrible dynamic that where you'll have
these upbraided and they'll they'll be linear many times, and
they'll cut a wide swath. You know, I'll never forget.
(39:31):
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 Uh. He's got this great picture of tire tracks
running across his chest.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (39:46):
You can actually his tandem wheels and you can see it,
and he survived, but he had all those and I
remember it from when I was a little kid. We
were amazed. I mean, we thank god that he survived.
He wound up becoming a preacher, and yeah, it does.
And you could see all 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 braiding the
(40:08):
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 rasions.
Speaker 2 (40:19):
Dave, Well, Joe, Now there were other things that were
on his body that they were able to determine that.
We're in various stages of healing abrasions and scabs and
what have you. But with have you ever seen have
you ever seen anything like this where there wasn't some
(40:42):
type of mechanical failure with a car, a boat, being
thrown from a building, of any number of things. This
is ostensibly a kid, a nineteen 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. There By
the way, for those who think there was a hit
(41:02):
and run involved to cause these types of injuries, there
was no. Uh, there's nothing indicating there was a hit
and run. There were no parts of a car.
Speaker 1 (41:14):
No skid marks, nothing, nothing. And look one other thing.
I'm sorry. I don't mean to jump on you here,
or not jump on you, but interrupt 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
(41:35):
a bumper on a car, it makes sense. It's two
parallel lines like this running hors and 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
(41:57):
the buick emblem literally pressed into the skin. And so
that's a classic finding and grill marks too, classic finding
of a pedestrian being struck by a vehicle. But you're
you're not hearing You're not hearing this, And so I
think that's their default position, is falling out of the
(42:20):
back of a truck as opposed to being struck by
a vehicle that is going through the person out me
through literally. But you know where where you've got a
static individual stand in the middle of the road and
they're struck by vehicle, those injuries are going to look different.
And this is this is almost and here's here's another theory.
(42:40):
I really, I really wonder Dave all of these injuries
that he sustained. I'm wondering, I'm really wondering if he
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
(43:04):
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 this specter that people keep talking about. I don't
(43:26):
know how to either validate it or invalidated. 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
(43:47):
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 still remains a mystery, and
(44:10):
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 Backs
Body Backs 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.
(00:32):
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 age,
riding around in the back of your buddy's pickup truck,
(00:53):
just going to spontaneous parties at someone's home. But you know,
even with all that going on 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
(01:14):
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
(01:35):
didn't match. As a matter of fact, one of the
shoes belong to someone else. Today we're going to talk
about the death and autopsy of no Oppress Grove. I'm
Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body Bags Dave. We
got a whole bunch of rural Now.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
We live in a rural area. I'm not that dissimilar
from Coklahoma where Noah press Grove grew up. He's nineteen,
graduated from high school, and he's at an end of
summer Labor Day, twenty second birthday party all rolled into
one on this weekend. The reason we're talking about Noah
press Grove's death is because his autopsy has come out.
Police are still on investigating this as if it's a murder,
(02:18):
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 nineteen
year old Noah press Grove. But before we do that,
(02:39):
I want to say a very quick hello and thank
you to Jennifer Williamson Ward. She is a friend of
Cheryl McCullum, 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 terms of on the air radio and TV
(03:00):
and what have you and podcasting, this is a story
that Joe has covered extensively from Court, TV to Nancy.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
To News Nation. I'm sure.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
I mean there's a crime related show, they asked 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 nineteen 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.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
That's the thing, isn't it. You know, 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
(03:50):
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 or relative to injuries
that could be evidenced externally. But you know, when I
can almost see because I've had to look on my face.
I can almost see the look on everyone's faces when
(04:11):
they started doing post mortm 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 day, 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
(04:33):
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 bumped around in the dark and you're going to
miss something. So if you can go in with this
(04:55):
idea of Okay, this is what the radiographs are showing me,
this is the information that has come in from law
enforcement that we're 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 where one group of injuries
(05:19):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
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 five point fifty
three am on September the fourth, now we're dealing with
last September. His body was found on the side of
the road. He was curled up in the fetal position,
(05:50):
naked except for as you mentioned, the mixed match shoes.
One was not even his Passing truck drivers saw him
and reported it called nine to 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 a truck it's a.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Small town, and news travels.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
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, you know, 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
(06:36):
know that 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
(06:59):
want any kind of preconceived notions as to what had
taken placetcha. And his brother said, I saw teeth, teeth,
and I'm okay, he's finding teeth and a pair of
shorts are folded.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Near him.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
He's nude, he's in a fetal position. I find teeth
near his 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
(07:36):
this young man, we're going to have to go through
them very carefully because they are so extensive. Yes, 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
(07:59):
that this is if this is one of those, there
were probably ten different on their own fatal injuries to
Noah Press Grove that you.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
Have had this, 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 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.
(08:34):
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 precept that is always
put forward that any time 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
(08:57):
like you know, people talking about suicides and the weapon
being found away from the body, like the body is
supposed to be holding the weapon every 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?
(09:18):
Is it 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 a fetal position,
(09:40):
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.
(10:00):
I don't know if the police have remarked about this
and explained this thing that the brother was witnessing. How
do undershorts wind up getting folded, Particularly if you're thinking, well,
maybe the got ripped off in the accident, or whatever
it is it happened. Because whatever happened involved a tremendous
amount of impact, I don't I'll put it to this way.
(10:24):
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 and the reason is, it's pretty simple, is
that when a body is impacted, it's not generally impacted
(10:47):
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, you know, a great, big,
you know, kind of question mark here, wondering what was
the generator, how did this happen? How did he wind
(11:09):
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? Dave you ever heard
(11:43):
that saying? It says, and it varies from time to time,
nothing good happens after eleven PM, or nothing good happened
after midnight. I know Noah was at a party and
kind of in and out. The details are a little
bit murky, a little, yeah, a little and I was
(12:04):
being calm and so there was a party. We know
that and it was a celebratory event and there were
many young people there. Can you kind of run this
top because tom Tommy does everything in this case, Can
you kind of break this down for us and give
us an idea.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
The murky part of it is that there was social
media being fed pictures and what have you of all
of the partying that was going on. A girl turned
twenty two, somebody that all grew up with. We hit
this in the first segment about it being close knit.
Everybody knows one another. When everybody knows one another, you
have a tendency to have smoldering problems. You got an
(12:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
You know.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
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 twenty second 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
(13:18):
at a future that included possibly joined 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
you know, it kind of goes on all weekend.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
You party, listen to music.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
The next day, you wake up whenever, and you know
pretty much go right back to it. But that's not
what happened. It was a multi day event that took place.
But the part of yours 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 as well.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
Back up.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Noah and five other guys, six guys rode this big ATV.
It's referred to as 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 pole, it wasn't hitting a curb.
(14:25):
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 Noah might
have been the driver of said vehicle. I don't know
if that's the case, but one thing we do know
(14:48):
is that it was bad enough that when he came
up dead, that was the first thing people thought of, 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
(15:08):
went back to the party.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
You know, Dave, when you have events and you mentioned
a rollover event, and these Ranger vehicles they come in
a couple of different configurations. You have two seater or
a 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
rollover event, just because there's a rollover doesn't mean that
(15:32):
you're not going to sustain injuries. And I have seen
I have seen people, Dave, that have been involved in
motor vehicle accidents. Where they get up and they are walking, talking,
fully oriented to time and space, and eight hours later
they die. And that's because something along the way was
(15:55):
clipped internally, generally some type of smaller vessel, and it's
a slow bloe 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
(16:17):
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, that it might not
(16:40):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
Think it's important to note that it was about 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.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Too quick.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
You're nineteen, you're ten fee telling bulletproof for grying out lot.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
Oh oh my gosh. Yeah. And look if you here's
the thing, 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,
(17:26):
there's a trauma response in your body. So let's just
say you have a broken rib, you get popped in aside,
and you don't know that necessarily that this is some
kind of fatal or lethal event, but yet it hurts.
But it's something it's not something that you know is
going to get you down on your knees, all right.
(17:49):
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 echymosis 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
(18:12):
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
(18:35):
had happened hours before or a day before may be
experiencing it'll 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
(18:58):
you're able as a scientists 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
(19:28):
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 bodyback Sanders 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.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
But you get the police theory that he was thrown
out the back of a truck that was moving jail.
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 gonna have arms,
You're going to have a lot of those type And
I'm saying that because I've been thrown out of the
back of the truck. I'm not by friends throwing me out.
(20:11):
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, these feet, ankles, what
have you. And he does not have those types of
injuries that actually match up to someone that was pitched
out of the back of a truck. I'm just saying
(20:31):
that because as we break these down, that's what I
went into it thinking happened, and I went, how did
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, ten broken ribs.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
With ten 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 to
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
(21:11):
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.
(21:34):
It's called a flail chest. And what happens is 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
(21:57):
you have that going on in and of itself with
the ribs, And to get ten broken ribs, Dave, is
something that I don't know 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.
(22:21):
Just think about it. If you were a kid and
you were in a tree house, 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 your 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 had
(22:44):
stuff here that at least implies that they're like multiple
impacts with a significant amount of force, because you're talking
about underlying fractures, Dave.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
And that's fine, I said, earlier that there are at
least ten injuries that, on their own, with nothing else,
could have been fatal. Go through the rest of this show.
I'm going to sit, hear and shut up because I really,
for the life.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
Of it, I think I think the thing that is.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
It's frustrated by what the police have said.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
I it is frustrating. I think probably no way.
Speaker 2 (23:17):
This didn't have that happened by jump falling out of
the back of a truck.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
That did not happen. Well, maybe if you fell out
of the back of the truck multiple times, is what
I think.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
I'd like to say. Yeah, let me hope back up
and try that again. I didn't break my leg this time.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
Come on, I know. And that's that's kind of you
know 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
(23:50):
because you know, the cops can say basically whatever they
want to say about what they're seeing at the scene.
How 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
(24:11):
heads over. I think probably the thing that jumps out
the most is that, you know, they talked about this
one central impact to the skull, which Dave I got
to tell you. It sounds like, and it's a it's
apparently a very very extensive injury, but it sounds like
a single impact that is almost being described as a
(24:34):
It seems to me is almost like a depressed skull fracture,
which means that it's not the skull is not just
simply fractured where you fracture like if you have a
Bowld egg and you kind of crack it, you know,
and it creates like this kind of curvelinear, you know, manifestation,
whereas we're talking about if you take that egg and
press it in, if you've ever done that with a
bold egg, you press it in on the sides and
(24:56):
it literally depresses and you have it's almost like a
that it creates and it kind of spider whebs 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.
(25:19):
I've seen people with depressed skull fractures that have been
pistol whipped. I'm 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
(25:42):
blood that poured out of the cranial vault.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
What does that mean to you.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
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 podcas cast. If you
will put your fingers adjacent to your external ear canal
on both sides, If you put your your index fingers
(26:09):
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,
so that and these fractures are amazing. When you see them,
(26:31):
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
(26:53):
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 foreime and 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, that created that you have
(27:17):
to have so much force in order to generate that
insult alone that it's it gives you pause. Okay, Hine.
Fractures don't occur all the time, and when you see them,
it's like, you know, if you're standing there with the
forensic pathologists, they'll say, oh my god, we got a
(27:37):
hinge fracture. You know, 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
(27:59):
brained damage in a sense that it's traumatically related. So
you'll have both in dwelling 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
(28:20):
the dura sack, which if you think of the dura
sac that encompasses the brain, it's almost like a placenta.
A matter of fact, it actually if you take the
dura matter and laid alongside a placenta, it looks a
lot like that. It's kind of a protective bag that
(28:41):
encases the brain itself. It's a wash and 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 blod contained in there.
(29:02):
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 his Noah's head and brain were
(29:23):
not a skull and brain were not just impacted, but
also his spinal cord. You get down to the sea one,
you've got multiple cervical vertebra and the C one is
what classically we refer to as the atlas. If you
think about the Titan Atlas from Greek mythology, Atlas is
(29:47):
that gigantic being that is holding up the earth. And
the reason they calls C one the atlas is because
it is literally where the skull is resting and supporting
from a skeletal standpoint, it's supporting the skull that the
C one Dave in this case is actually displaced. Okay,
(30:08):
So it's been it's been knocked out for a lack
of a better term in Layman's. In Layman's terms, it
has been displaced. So it's kind of knocked knocked out
of alignment. As a matter of fact, some have described
this as a displacement that might be consistent with what
(30:29):
you would see in a judicial hanging, which leads to death.
So if you you know, when people talk about the
snapping of a neck when they're falling from a height,
the C one C two is what's impacted, and you
know when people are are in judicial hangings, that's what
I'm talking about. I'm not talking about anything self inflicted here.
The goal was that that would fall from such a
(30:51):
height that it would displace the C one and C two,
which are a critical level in the spot that if
those things are displaced, it's incompatible with life, okay, because
it impacts those basic 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
(31:14):
and all that other regulatory stuff. So that that has
been impacted, for lack of a better term. Uh, 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,
(31:35):
which again is kind of a friction related type of event.
You know, 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.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
And it's it's it's it goes from an abrasion to
a tearing laceration where it's kind of ripped through. And
as the police began to work the scene where Noah's found,
it wasn't just teeth. You know that. We're 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
(32:16):
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,
(32:39):
we talked about teeth, both upper and lower. So you're
talking about your maxillary teeth, which are your upper teeth,
and your mangellary 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
(32:59):
across the roadway. Dave. You know when 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. Right, Brother, he's got teeth that are fractured
and missing, Okay, that are strewn about. Now we have
(33:23):
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 a head more than likely that depressed area
in the in the skull that generated the initial injury.
But now you've got teeth that are coming out of his.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
Head like a curb stomp.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
Well, 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,
(34:08):
like the lips and the jaw.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
Now, he did have a cut on his lip, and
he had a cut on his tongue. But can I
back up to something that 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,
(34:34):
and it was specific to that 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.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
Yeah, you know, And who's to know what the dynamic
of this event is. He is nude, so how with
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
(35:15):
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 are 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
(35:36):
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 point of origin? What species
is it? Is it his? Does it? Does it look
like his hair color? Is he missing hair that had
(35:59):
been torn out? Other than the sibility?
Speaker 2 (36:02):
Animal could have done it?
Speaker 1 (36:03):
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. You know, all we can do in
forensics is document what we see there. It's hard to
really extrapolate further than that, but it is it is
certainly an interesting finding. I don't know that I've ever
(36:27):
seen that kind of phraseology before that.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
I haven't, and I read these things all the time,
and I have done stories where a hair was pulled out,
you know. It just sounds like the most painful thing.
Of course, on this list of things, I'm still beyond
the pale Joe. But the he's bleeding out of his ears, yes,
got teeth thrown everywhere.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
Bleeding out of the ears is consistent with the hinge fracture,
by the way, and you would probably also, yeah, and
you probably if looking closely, you could probably see cerebral
spinal fluid. You know how they when you're a kid
and if you take a first A class, they tell
you to look for a clear fluid coming from the ears.
That's That's what I'm talking about. So you'll get this
kind of co mingled with hine fracture. You'll see kind
(37:13):
of a commingled cerebral spinal fluid along with blood, and
it's got kind of a straw color to it. 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 from that area,
and again that goes to something has happened that has
(37:35):
compromised the structural integrity of the spinal column with this displacement.
And brother, it wasn't just as C one. You know,
I failed to mention that he's got fractured C two,
which obviously is just beneath the C one and C six.
We're going down the column now. C six and C
seven were also fractured to varying degrees. And there's multiple
(37:58):
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, they they're therefore, I mean, think about
what they're protecting, man, I mean, they're protecting your spinal column.
(38:21):
It's just like the skull, particularly on the back, is
very robust and thick. It's 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,
(38:44):
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 a 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, multiple surfaces, which many
times are associated with rollover injury. So if you've got
(39:08):
scrapes and abrasions and they're kind of wrap what they
call wrap around injuries, that's traditionally what you're looking for.
So if the if the vehicle is spinning, the body
will be spinning, okay, and you hit asphalt gravel, you're
going to get this horrible dynamic that where you'll have
these upbraided and they'll they'll be linear many times, and
they'll cut a wide swath. You know, I'll never forget.
(39:31):
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 Uh. He's got this great picture of tire tracks
running across his chest.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (39:46):
You can actually his tandem wheels and you can see it,
and he survived, but he had all those and I
remember it from when I was a little kid. We
were amazed. I mean, we thank god that he survived.
He wound up becoming a preacher, and yeah, it does.
And you could see all 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 braiding the
(40:08):
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 rasions.
Speaker 2 (40:19):
Dave, Well, Joe, Now there were other things that were
on his body that they were able to determine that.
We're in various stages of healing abrasions and scabs and
what have you. But with have you ever seen have
you ever seen anything like this where there wasn't some
(40:42):
type of mechanical failure with a car, a boat, being
thrown from a building, of any number of things. This
is ostensibly a kid, a nineteen 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. There By
the way, for those who think there was a hit
(41:02):
and run involved to cause these types of injuries, there
was no. Uh, there's nothing indicating there was a hit
and run. There were no parts of a car.
Speaker 1 (41:14):
No skid marks, nothing, nothing. And look one other thing.
I'm sorry. I don't mean to jump on you here,
or not jump on you, but interrupt 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
(41:35):
a bumper on a car, it makes sense. It's two
parallel lines like this running hors and 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
(41:57):
the buick emblem literally pressed into the skin. And so
that's a classic finding and grill marks too, classic finding
of a pedestrian being struck by a vehicle. But you're
you're not hearing You're not hearing this, And so I
think that's their default position, is falling out of the
(42:20):
back of a truck as opposed to being struck by
a vehicle that is going through the person out me
through literally. But you know where where you've got a
static individual stand in the middle of the road and
they're struck by vehicle, those injuries are going to look different.
And this is this is almost and here's here's another theory.
(42:40):
I really, I really wonder Dave all of these injuries
that he sustained. I'm wondering, I'm really wondering if he
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
(43:04):
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 this specter that people keep talking about. I don't
(43:26):
know how to either validate it or invalidated. 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
(43:47):
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 still remains a mystery, and
(44:10):
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 Backs
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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