“It didn’t matter what group you were in,” recalls his older brother, “you got along with Noah”
The family of Noah Pesgrove — the 19-year-old whose body was discovered on the side of a highway in Oklahoma in September 2023, with mysterious and severe injuries — is still reeling from his death and the future he never got to experience.
Even as his older brother Dailen Presgrove, 24, tells PEOPLE in this week’s cover story that “somebody knows something,” he acknowledges “there’s still so much uncertainty.”
Noah was found early on Sept. 4, 2023 — naked, the base of his skull split in two and with his spine fractured, among other wounds — about a mile from a packed house party that he attended with friends the night before.
But in the 10 months since then, much remains publicly in dispute or unclear about how he turned up dead.
None of it makes sense to Dailen. Not his brother being gone, not the questions his family still has or the answers they don’t.
“It doesn’t make sense that a good person like Noah is gone in such a cruel and unknown way,” he says.
Dailen and other relatives has launched their own campaign to get answers about Noah’s death with the help of a private investigator. Law enforcement says their investigation is ongoing but have declined to say much else in public.
“I feel like we probably have not properly grieved because it’s been this ongoing cycle of trying to figure this out,” says Noah’s cousin Ashley Chadwick. “We can’t rest until he’s able to rest. So we’re just trying to navigate all through this.”
Oklahoma state police have told PEOPLE that they don’t believe the Comanche, Okla., native was murdered and but have not yet confirmed what exactly led to his fatal injuries. (His autopsy lists his cause of death as blunt force trauma but came to no conclusion about how that occurred.)
For those who knew and loved the outgoing and often boisterous athlete, the loss is still painful. “He had a future of ahead of him,” says Chadwick.
“He was a good, respectful kid,” his grandmother Deborah “Nana” Smith tells PEOPLE. She helped raise Noah while his mother, Kasey Elliot, struggled with substance abuse throughout his youth. “So many people cared about him,” Smith says.
Noah had a habit of helping out his grandmother and great-grandmother Sandra Quisenberry, whom he lived with — his bedroom between theirs — before he died.
“He helped [us] out so much. Always has,” Smith says, remembering how he and other of her grandchildren would pitch in on mowing her expansive property.
And when Quisenberry was diagnosed with cancer, when Noah was a younger teen, he shaved his head in solidarity.
His mom, in a separate interview with PEOPLE, says she is now sober but has been grappling with her grief while looking back at some of her own memories of motherhood. “I’ve been dreaming about the times I tucked him in at night,” she says.
After his high school graduation in 2023, Noah — one of 10 brothers and sisters in a big, blended family — pondered going to college and continuing to compete as a wrestler but ultimately realized that he couldn’t afford to do it without somehow landing an athletic scholarship.
“He was very athletic, very outdoorsy, very easygoing and just so well-rounded,” says his sister Madison Rawlings, 23. “He never held a grudge. If he was upset, it was only for a moment and that was it.”
Despite kicking around ideas for various post-high school jobs, ranging from working on a shrimp boat to becoming a welder, Chadwick says her cousin was ultimately leaning toward enlisting in the military.
“He was waiting for his cousin Travis to graduate from high school [in 2024], then they were going to join the military together,” she says. “He wanted to wait for Travis, so they could have that adventure of going through basic training together.”
Adds Chadwick, who was always struck by Noah’s focus and stamina in high school, playing football on Friday nights and then competing in cross-country races the next morning: “Being young and willing to make that sacrifice [by joining the military], I’ve always thought was very admirable.”
It was Noah’s fun-loving side that brother Dailen, who taught at his high school, misses. “Noah was a goofy, loving guy,” says Dailen, who still laughs at the memory of Noah push-starting his 1988 Bronco pickup truck because he refused to spend the money to get it fixed.
“He’s the type of kid that some teachers might hate, but everyone in the class and some of the other teachers absolutely loved because he was always in a very positive mood. If you’re around Noah, you were more than likely going to be laughing,” Dailen says. “It didn’t matter what group you were in — you got along with Noah.”
