An Oklahoma mechanic says his truck struck an unidentified object on an empty road where a teenager was found dead in mysterious circumstances moments later.

Chris Payette, 25, was driving along the US-81 between Terral in Oklahoma and nearby Tyler in Texas with two friends around 5:30am on the morning of September 4, 2023 when he felt a bump.

Noah Presgrove, who was 19, was spotted dead on the same stretch of road almost naked and next to his teeth by an unidentified truck driver around 13 minutes later. 

That trucker called 911, setting off an ongoing mystery that has gripped America over whether Noah, who was drunk, died in an accident or met with foul play. 

Payette spoke to the Daily Mail this week after his name was added to a lawsuit filed by Noah's family that seeks to get to the bottom of the teenager's mysterious death.

He said that on feeling a 'bump' under the wheels of his old Dodge truck, he believed he had 'run over a pothole or hit a small animal.'

The lights of an oncoming semi-trailer shining into his windscreen prevented him from seeing what he had hit on the dark road in front of him. 

'It wasn't bad, but you could tell definitely you hit something,' said Payette, who has repeatedly been cleared of wrongdoing by police.

'We continued on with our trip because it's not an odd occurrence to hit animals around here. We've hit hogs before, we've hit deer before.

'It's just one of those things. The truck kept going, so there wasn't a reason to stop.'

Payette said he and his friends completed their errand to buy a truck and were about to head home when one saw news of Noah's death on Snapchat. 

'I just looked over at him, and I said, "We hit something in Terrell, Oklahoma",' Payette recalled.

'I called in (to the Oklahoma Highway Patrol) saying that I might have hit something there and I wanted to be certain that if I'd done something like that, I wasn't running from it.

'They looked over my pickup for probably two or three hours and got our stories from all of us. Then they said we were good to go.'

Payette said the police told him he likely hit a fallen roll of carpet that was found on the road a mile or two north of Presgrove's body. 

When the Daily Mail visited the scene earlier this week, a metal cross memorial had been erected in Noah's honor.

Payette thought no more of the incident until a year later, when the Oklahoma Highway Patrol and Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation officers came to his grandfather's home, where he was living. 

The officers told him there were new investigators taking over Noah's death investigation and they wanted to go over everything involved in it a second time.

'They brought like 3D scan and photograph machines and took pictures of everything,' he said.

Then they said to bring the truck to a facility outside Duncan, Oklahoma, for forensic analysis.

Forensic experts pored over the car for hours, photographing it and swabbing the entire front of it for traces of blood.

'They said they would give me a call back if they found anything, but it's been two years and I never heard from them again,' Payette said.

'I'm not here to hide anything. If police want something, they can call me.'

Assuming he was in the clear, Payette sold the Dodge in July as it had more than 500,000 miles on it and was worn out.

Just weeks later, he found himself dragged back into the Noah mystery after being named as a defendant in the amended suit filed by the Presgrove family. 

Payette has yet to be served with the lawsuit. 

He retained a lawyer once he saw the leaked first page of the amended complaint, which was first detailed by the Daily Mail last week and included in a public court filing. 

A judge ruled that the full complaint should be released to the public, but that has not yet happened. 

Payette has been told by his attorney that Noah's family are likely just looking to glean as much information as possible from anyone with even the most tenuous of connections to the tragedy, as they build their civil case. They are seeking at least $75,000 in damages in total.  

'My lawyer said that so far he thinks it's just for them to cover their a**,' Payette said.

'So if they didn't put me on there and they went after the friend's beating theory and it was a pickup truck, then they couldn't come back after me after the fact.'

His involvement in the case led to sporadic harassment, he said, whenever he drove into Terral or the nearby towns where Noah and his friends and family lived.

'Every time I drove that truck into town, somebody was out there looking at it or taking a picture of it or following me home,' he said.

'People were driving by my grandpa's house because that's where I lived at the time. I've had so many people come out to that house and drive by.'

Payette said the harassment left him concerned for his elderly grandfather whose house he no longer lived in.

'it's not something that bothers me because I have hundreds of guns. I'm not worried about someone following me around,' he said.

'But my grandpa is very old, he's a widower - my grandma died a couple of months ago - and he can't get around very well, he's had hip surgery, shoulder surgeries.

'I don't want something to happen to him over it just because someone's pissed off about what they think happened.'

Payette believed it was very unlikely that Noah was hit by a large vehicle at full speed because his remains were relatively intact. 

'I've hit hogs or something or deer and I've got out and just like looked at it and it blows them to shreds every time,' he said.

'If that truck would have ever hit him, he would be fairly unrecognizable.'

The newly-amended lawsuit alleges that Avery Jo Combs, 25, 'made one or more statements about harming or killing' Noah on the morning of his death. 

Avery was said to have been in a casual relationship with Noah at the time of his death. She was hosting a 22nd birthday party at a house on the night of the tragedy.  

Avery previously denied allegations made against her in the initial lawsuit and her lawyer declined to comment on the leaked page when contact by the Daily Mail. 

'Hours later, defendants provided Noah with alcohol past the point of intoxication. Then defendants stood by as multiple boys jumped him,' the new filing continued. 

'The defendants pursued Noah on a side-by-side off-road during the period before he was found near Highway 81.'

Who the 'multiple boys' who supposedly attacked Presgrove were is not explained in the first page of the amended complaint. 

All parties named in the original civil complaint have denied the allegations made against them.