Key points after 20th week of Noah Donohoe inquest

Need to know

The long-running inquest into the death of the 14-year-old is being heard with a jury at Belfast Coroner’s Court

• At least two people who “had eyes” on Noah Donohoe on the night of his disappearance were not asked to give statements by police, the inquest heard on Monday. The PSNI officer responsible for co-ordinating house-to-house searches the week of the 14-year-old’s disappearance in June 2020 said it was for senior investigating officers to decide who would give witness statements. PSNI Detective Inspector McCartan, who was a detective constable in 2020, led the house-to-house searches conducted to find the missing schoolboy. The parameters for the search included homes on a number of streets in the Northwood Drive area near the culvert where Noah’s body was later found. Mr McCartan told the inquest full resident house-to-house forms were not completed for each visit as it would be “hugely time-consuming”, officers instead using a questionnaire form that Mr McCartan himself produced and he said was “considerably quicker”.
• Brenda Campbell KC, representing Noah’s mother Fiona Donohoe, questioned the officer about the process for flagging any “thematic” issues uncovered in the searches. Mr McCartan said he collated a spreadsheet that was updated at the end of each day by officers involved in searches that the investigating officers and CCTV and witness co-ordinators would have had access to. Ms Campbell highlighted “two neighbours”, one referring to “a back door handle being tried around 3am” and another referring to screams heard in the area on the Sunday night Noah was last seen. The inquest was then shown a questionnaire from a house in Northwood Road where the resident reported hearing “noises” and a comment reading “back of house”. Mr McCartan said the officer who filled out that form “would have pressed” the residents if there was a “specific noise” and also said he could not say “for definite” the back-of-the-house comment referred to where the resident felt the noise was coming from.
• Pressed on the fact there is no statement from that witness from 2020, the officer said it is “not for me to collate witness statements”, his job at that time was trying to figure out “where Noah was and where he had gone to next”. The jurors later saw a house-to-house questionnaire where the residents described a “tall” boy with “dark hair” and seeing him “take his top off and put it on the wall” at the address some of Noah’s clothes were later found. Ms Campbell put it to the officer that when Noah was at that address at Northwood Drive “at least two people had eyes on him and we have statements from neither of them”, asking Mr McCartan “your response is the same, not your responsibility, not your remit?”, to which he responded “yes”.
• A senior PSNI officer has conceded the mother of Noah Donohoe is “in a position of not having answers” about the death of her son because of “mistakes made” by police. PSNI Detective Chief Inspector Phillips became the senior investigating officer (SIO) in relation to Noah’s case on Wednesday 24 June 2020, when it was transferred to the Criminal Investigation Department (CID).
• Mr Phillips said: “There are broadly things that we have missed and mistakes made which has left Fiona in a position of not having answers. In terms of what that would have told us in terms of what happened to Noah – I don’t think so.” Referring to a CCTV camera which police failed to procure footage from, Mr Phillips said: “I’m sorry, that should have been found. Fiona shouldn’t be sat here six years on wondering was there a camera there and what did it show,” he said. He added: “With the benefit of hindsight we did everything we could to find him and I’m content that the PSNI did everything we could to find him as quickly as we could.” The officer went on: “Certainly as time has gone on I regularly think if there was something I could have done to manage my relationship with Fiona in a different way because it deteriorated so quickly. I am truly sorry for any part that I played in that. Noah’s case is unusual enough as it is, nobody should be in this position. I think six years on, I don’t know what else we could have done to help us understand what happened to him and why.”
• Police “pursued the child and not the evidence” in their investigation into the death and disappearance of Noah Donohoe, the inquest heard on Wednesday. Earlier in her examination, Ms Campbell contested that Mr Phillips “pursued a hypothesis that blamed a child, that he did this by choice”. He said: “I disagree with the phrase I blamed him.” Ms Campbell then clarified that he “pursued a hypothesis that Noah did this by choice”. He replied: “Yes, that is where I felt the evidence and information took us.”
• Ms Campbell put it to Mr Phillips “you challenged and you changed nothing” about the search, to which he said “no”, and then “you didn’t challenge and you didn’t change the deployment of specialist resource”. Mr Phillips said: “No, I asked the question but I didn’t suggest they were going too slowly.” When being asked about further failings to recover CCTV footage, Mr Phillips defended PSNI colleagues. He said it was his job as SIO to “drive the investigation to, yes, ensure the information they had was correct and in some cases that didn’t work” and “there were some failings and I’ve apologised for that” but added that is “not to say people involved in this were incompetent, they were good detectives for many years”. He said detectives and officers involved in Noah’s investigation have worked on “many many instances, many crimes, other cases that have all worked out very well so, yes we made mistakes but they’re not incompetent individuals”. He added: “None of this was done deliberately; it was just human error.”
• The inquest continues.

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