Need to know
The inquest heard this week from police officers involved in the initial search for the missing schoolboy
Noah Donohoe
Everything you need to know after week four of Noah Donohoe inquest
- On Monday, a police officer who was one of the first to attend the area Noah Donohoe was last seen said he was “not aware at the time” it was a high risk missing persons case. Constable Wilson was one of the first officers called to Northwood Road, after reports of Noah’s bike being found. He also recalled finding trainers and a jumper along the road, which he put into evidence bags and placed in the police car. However, these bags were not forensically sealed.
- Earlier in the day on Monday, the inquest heard from Conor McConnell, who was at his mother’s partner’s house on Northwood Road on Sunday, June 21. He said he thought it was a “prank” when he saw the schoolboy cycling naked on the day he disappeared. Mr McConnell was questioned about the number of calls he made to police, and the timings of these.
- A former police inspector told the inquest on Tuesday how he crawled through an underground storm drain tunnel system as part of efforts to find the missing schoolboy. The retired officer said he believed the tunnels would have been a “very challenging place to survive if you were naked.” Mr Menary told the inquest he had attended Northwood Linear Park in north Belfast on March 24, three days after Noah had gone missing.
- Mr Menary told the inquest there were “hundreds of local residents in quite an agitated state” in the park due to the disappearance of Noah. He said it took more than an hour to clear the park so police could begin an inspection of the storm drain tunnel system. A subsequent statement said there were up to 400 people in the park. He said the crowd were “mostly well-meaning”, but that some were “behaving in a hostile fashion”. He said: “It was simply not possible to engage in the search before clearing the park.”
- On Wednesday, Mr Menary resumed his evidence in the inquest, telling Belfast coroner’s court that anyone entering the tunnel without protective clothing would have been “absolutely frozen”. He told the jury his team resumed to search of a stretch of the storm drain network on Thursday June 25, four days after Noah went missing. The tunnel could be accessed from a culvert entrance in Northwood Linear Park in north Belfast, close to where Noah had last been seen on the Sunday before. Mr Menary told the jury that at this stage he was involved in a search operation, not a body recovery operation. He said at that point there was “no evidence” Noah had gone down into the storm drain.
- The barrister representing Fiona Donohoe, Brenda Campbell KC, questioned the retired officer on the pace of the search operation. Mr Menary agreed with Ms Campbell’s statement that the search “neither started nor proceeded with any sense of urgency.”
- On Thursday, a police constable told the inquest he viewed CCTV footage of a naked youth jumping off his bike and running towards wasteland. Constable Morrow told a court that he had attended Northwood Road in north Belfast on the night after Noah disappeared in June 2020, and was shown the footage on a resident of the street’s mobile phone.
To ensure you don’t miss out on all the latest from Belfast Live, be sure to make us your preferred source on Google.
