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 into his death has heard.
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.
Noah, a pupil at St Malachy’s College, was 14 when his body was found in a storm drain tunnel in north Belfast on June 27th, six days after he left home on his bike to meet two friends in the Cavehill area of the city.
A post-mortem examination found the cause of death was drowning.
The inquest, which is now in its 20th week, heard from PSNI Detective Inspector McCartan, who was a detective constable in 2020 when he led the house-to-house searches conducted to find the missing schoolboy.
As house-to-house co-ordinator, he said his task was to attend addresses to identify potential witnesses.
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.
McCartan said 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 McCartan himself produced and he said was “considerably quicker”.
Brenda Campbell, representing Noah’s mother Fiona Donohoe, questioned the officer about the process for flagging any “thematic” issues uncovered in the searches.
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.
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”.
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.
The officers’ spreadsheet was then shown to the court and beside one house number a comment was written “misper naked, deserted bike and walked up back of house”.
Asked if McCartan thought the officer was telling him the residents “saw misper naked”, he replied “I can’t answer that”, adding “I didn’t quiz (the officer) on what she had put on each of those boxes”.
Later, Campbell said the spreadsheet implied “on one reading” a witness who saw Noah naked and asked “whose job is it to flag that to make sure somebody’s going out there to get that statement?”
McCartan said it would have been reviewed by CCTV and the witness co-ordinator after being added to the spreadsheet.
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.
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 McCartan “your response is the same, not your responsibility, not your remit?”, to which he responded “yes”.
She showed the court an entry on the spreadsheet beside a redacted house number with the comment “strange activity”, which McCartan said he could not elaborate on.
Campbell asked “has anyone ever asked you to?”, to which he replied “no”.
Later, under questioning from PSNI representative Donal Lunny, McCartan agreed that the information on searches in the spreadsheet was “accessible by any officer during that week” and if they “had any questions” they would be able to contact him.
Lunny asked if investigating officers would “know where to go to get that information” if they had questions such as those posed by Campbell, to which McCartan said: “Yes”.
Police logs were also seen by the jury showing that by June 26th, 187 witnesses had been identified by police.
By July 9th 2020, more than 200 potential witnesses had been identified before being honed to 13 “significant witnesses”.
