It was a 999 call that lasted 25 minutes and 28 seconds.
“I’m phoning about my son, he’s 14, he’s not back home yet,” it began.
“Over the last week he has not been himself at all, and I am really concerned for his safety.”
Played in full at the opening of the inquest into the death of Belfast teenager Noah Donohoe, the emergency call was made by his mother Fiona Donohoe on the night of his disappearance in June 2020.
As jurors listened to the distressing recording in Northern Ireland’s biggest courtroom in Belfast eight months ago, Fiona Donohoe sat facing them, her head in her hands, crying silently.
Noah was her only child and she raised him as a single parent.
He had never gone missing before, which sparked a major search operation.
Police discovered Noah’s naked body in an underground water tunnel in north Belfast six days after he went missing.
He had left home on his bike to meet two friends in the Cavehill area in the north of city.
On Tuesday, a jury at Belfast Coroner’s Court found found that Stormont’s Department for Infrastructure “erred” in its management of a culvert entrance to the tunnel close to where the 14-year-old was last seen alive.
Police errors did not contribute to his death, jurors agreed. However, they found 13 failings during the PSNI investigation.
The findings came after almost six months of evidence that included 76 witnesses, statements from a further 42 people, as well as maps, video footage, photographs, police logs and expert reports.
The inquest was adjourned in July following a late night hearing – jurors were told they were in “totally uncharted waters” as the court sat until shortly before 1am – when the jury failed to reach the required unanimous verdict.
The case has received saturation media coverage in Northern Ireland over the past six years.
Conspiracy theories about the teenager’s death were widespread on social media, prompting warnings from coroner Kevin Rooney about its usage before – and during – the inquest.
Paedophiles and paramilitaries were among those linked to Noah’s disappearance in online posts, claims dismissed as “baseless rumours” by a senior police officer involved in the investigation.
Kidnap and murder were among the theories that circulated for years.
Yet in his lengthy charge to the jurors, Rooney told them they had to rule out certain outcomes – linked to much of the speculation – due to insufficient evidence.
Significantly, the jury could not find Noah was assaulted after he went missing or that there was any third-party involvement; they were also not permitted to find he was a victim of child exploitation.
Rooney also said the jury was not permitted to find he was under the influence of drugs, going through a psychotic episode or that he had taken his own life.
Checks had been carried out on known sex offenders by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) as part of their investigation into his disappearance.
A forensic pathologist who gave evidence to the inquest described it as “one of the most extraordinary cases” he had ever dealt with.
More than 600 calls were made to police during the week of Noah’s disappearance; the scale of the public response was “unprecedented” in a missing persons case in Northern Ireland.
Fiona Donohoe led a high-profile campaign for answers about her son’s death, backed by supporters calling themselves “Noah’s Army”.
In her pre-recorded statement to the inquest – she did not take the stand – she thanked supporters and expressed hope the inquest would provide answers, “however painful those answers may be for me to bear”.
Speaking outside Belfast Laganside court complex following the verdict on Tuesday, a solicitor delivered a statement on Fiona Donohoe’s behalf.
“I came to this inquest seeking answers and I leave it with one clear answer – Noah was failed,” it said.
A high achiever who was “very humble”, Noah Donohoe wanted to study medicine at Trinity College Dublin; his cello teacher at St Malachy’s described him as “exceptional”.
During his first year in the prestigious Belfast grammar school, he won the “spirit of St Malachy’s” award and UK mathematics awards. He “threw himself” into the school rugby team and played for the under-14 teams of Belfast’s Phoenix Basketball Club.
In the evidence presented during the inquest, the jury of seven men and two women heard Fiona Donohoe last saw Noah when he left their home at Fitzroy Avenue in south Belfast at 5.40pm on Sunday, June 21st, 2020.
He told her he was cycling to meet two friends at Cave Hill, around 4km from their home.
Noah had hugged his mother throughout that day and told her he loved her, and at about 4pm she found him crying in his bedroom.
“I asked him why he was crying. He turned to me and said he was laughing,” Fiona Donohoe said.
In her 999 call to police – made four hours after he left their apartment – she said she had been “very concerned about his mental health all week”.
“He has been so up and down, his moods have been so out of character,” she told the call handler.
“All this day, he’s been really huggy.”
Noah took a backpack containing his laptop and a book, 12 Rules for Life, by Jordan Peterson, which he had become “obsessed” with, she said.
The last sighting of Noah Donohoe was at 6.05pm when CCTV showed him on Northwood Road in north Belfast, where he was “disturbingly” cycling along “completely naked”, barrister Peter Coll said.
Footage showed he had discarded his belongings, including his rucksack and phone, and at one point in his journey he fell off his bike.
He abandoned his bike on a pavement at Northwood Road close to waste ground where a culvert entrance to an underground water system is located.
Bars on the entrance to the tunnel were “far enough apart” to allow someone of Noah’s build to pass through.
Noah’s body was found six days later more than 600m downstream in the tunnel system close to the M2 motorway.
A postmortem examination found his death was due to drowning.
The fact he was naked was “extremely out of character for Noah”, who was a “very private person”, Donohoe said in her witness statement.
“There is no explanation for this behaviour and I desperately need some answers.”
Describing their relationship, she said they had a “beautiful magic bond”. Noah was an “upbeat, positive young boy who embraced anything that came his way”.
“He was a constant source of wonder to me and his ability knew no bounds,” she said.
There were occasions when she had stayed overnight with a former partner before the Covid-19 period and left Noah alone at home.
She used Noah’s Instagram account to maintain “regular contact” with him if she was away, jurors were told.
She said she would “never have left Noah” unless she had been sure he was “safe”, comfortable with the arrangement and “knew how to contact me”. Had she known how “limited” their time would be together, she would never have left her son, she added.
In her evidence, the principal of St Malachy’s College said the teenager was one of the top achievers in his year group.
“Noah was humble though he was exceptionally bright,” Deirdre McCusker said.
He was “eccentric but not in a bad way … his mind was always 14 steps ahead”, according to Jay Tierney, a close schoolfriend.
The pair had planned to meet at Cave Hill on the day of Noah’s disappearance, but the trip was cancelled by Tierney due to poor weather.
In a message to Tierney and another friend on June 19th, Noah spoke about his feelings, saying: “Dude I’ve been really up and down the past few days, just thinking about life in general.
“I realise that has taken a toll on me. But I’m fine now and I’m sorry if I’ve been really cold with you.”
In another message, Noah said he “realised there’s stuff I’ve been in denial about”.
He did not want to lie to his friends about how he “felt in the past”, he wrote.
Donal Lunney, counsel for the PSNI, asked Tierney whether he knew what had caused his friend’s “denial”.
He said he could not speculate on this but did not believe it was linked to Noah’s sexuality.
“Noah was definitely straight. There’s no notion of Noah struggling with his sexuality,” Tierney said.
The two friends had met for the first time since lockdown the day before his disappearance and had a three-hour walk across the city.
Tierney became emotional in the witness box recalling moments during their walk.
The main focus of their conversation was the 12 Rules for Life book.
“It seemed to be very important to him … It was like the book was the catalyst to what he was thinking,” Tierney told the court.
Concerns about the PSNI investigation into her son’s disappearance were raised by Fiona Donohoe in her statement to the inquest.
Gaps in CCTV footage, which showed Noah’s cycle route across the city on the day he went missing, were among her criticisms of how the case was handled.
A “blind eye” was turned to evidence that “conflicted with the police theory” that Noah suffered a concussion after a head injury linked to his fall, she claimed.
She questioned whether her son’s life could have been saved if the “right steps had been taken”.
CCTV footage of Noah leaving their home late at night on the day he disappeared was not shown to her until two years after his death, the court was told.
It shows the schoolboy going out the front door of their apartment building at 3.34am on June 21st, 2020, wearing flip flops, a T-shirt and shorts and carrying headphones. He returns at 4.08am barefoot and without his headphones.
In her witness statement, Donohoe said she did not hear her son leave that night.
It had taken her “completely by surprise” when her solicitor made her aware of the video; she felt “let down” that police had not provided her with the footage sooner.
PSNI detectives did not view it until January 2022, the court heard.
Jurors identified this delay as one of 13 police failings in their findings.
Further concerns were raised about CCTV footage police failed to seize from a rear-facing camera on a house in Northwood Road.
Jurors also watched a nine-minute compilation of CCTV footage tracing Noah’s route through the city to the final moments of his journey.
A resident living in a street close to where Noah was last seen described hearing a “high-pitched scream” on the night he disappeared.
A police officer who had a leading role in the search insisted in his evidence that Noah’s body had been found “as quickly and safely as he could have been.”
Sgt Barry Hutchings tasked a team to carry out a search of the underground water tunnel in Northwood Linear Park on June 23rd, 2020, after discovering that a hatch on it could be opened.
Challenged by a barrister representing Fiona Donohoe about a possible “12-hour delay” in conducting the culvert search, Hutchings said there had been “nothing to suggest he was in there”.
Wider searches were taking place across Belfast and the underground water tunnel was only searched to “discount it”, he added.
Evidence about the “horrendous” conditions the teenager would have experienced in the storm tunnel was given by a retired police officer involved in the search.
Philip Menary, the former PSNI inspector who was part of the police hazardous environment team that searched the underground tunnel, became emotional when he told the court he still thought all the time about Noah Donohoe being “naked and afraid” before his death.
Menary crawled through the “claustrophobic” underground tunnel system where there was “complete blackness” and water “continually coming over you”.
“Somebody doing that with no clothes, it would have been absolutely horrendous and you would have been absolutely frozen,” said Menary.
His team began searching the underground system three days after Noah went missing.
Searches of the Linear Park area were halted for a period because hundreds of “hostile” people had gathered.
Rumours were “rife” on social media that Noah had been abducted by loyalist paramilitaries or sex offenders and that police were involved in a “cover-up”.
There was an “anti-police” sentiment among some of the crowd, Menary said.
Graphic details about the condition of Noah’s body when it was recovered were given in evidence by a pathologist who carried out the postmortem examination on June 27th, 2020.
Fiona Donohoe sat alone at the back of the courtroom as photographs of her son’s body were shown to the jury but not presented to court.
Pathologist Marjorie Turner said she found the teenager’s death was consistent with drowning and there was “nothing to suggest involvement of another individual”.
There was “significant” bruising to his forehead and he had bruises and abrasions to other areas including his forehead, hands, knees and elbows.
Two other pathologists agreed with her finding.
Evidence suggested Noah was alive when he encountered water in the underground water tunnel.
They concluded Noah probably died close to the time of his disappearance – possibly on the day or day after.
It was also suggested he could potentially have survived until Tuesday. There was a possibility, though unlikely, that he was still alive on Wednesday, June 24th.
In its verdict, the jury found Noah died between 7pm and midnight on Sunday, 21st June
Toxicology analysis found “no evidence” Noah was under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
However, the presence of some substances including so-called “designer drugs” could not be “completely excluded” because of the limits of testing.
Four mental health experts – three psychiatrists and a psychologist – concluded that Noah was not suffering from an acute mental illness before his disappearance.
The case was a “puzzling, bizarre event”, according to consultant psychiatrist Richard Church.
The specialists agreed they did not think Noah was suicidal.
Any involvement of Daryl Paul – who received a three-month prison sentence in January 2021 after pleading guilty to stealing a rucksack containing Noah’s laptop and schoolbooks – in Noah’s disappearance was categorically ruled out.
During the inquest, the safety measures around the culvert where Noah’s body was found – and whether a hatch on the culvert’s debris screen was locked – were questioned by a lawyer for Fiona Donohoe.
An official from the North’s Department for Infrastructure – which is responsible for the culvert’s maintenance – rejected a suggestion that the department “didn’t have a clue” whether the hatch was locked when Noah Donohoe entered it.
“We formed the view early on that it wasn’t locked and we were very open about that,” Jonathan McKee said.
A lawyer representing the department told the inquest there had been “no known public access” or unauthorised access to the culvert before 2020.
The senior investigating police officer in the case, PSNI Det Ch Insp Tom Phillips, was the last of the 76 witnesses to give evidence in person to the inquest.
He apologised to Fiona Donohoe for “mistakes made” by police that had left her “in a position of not having answers”.
Phillips said he was “truly sorry” for a breakdown in relations between her and the PSNI.
One of the “biggest mistakes made” was that he “didn’t challenge mum’s account enough” meaning police “didn’t look at [Noah’s] actions in the days and weeks prior to his disappearance”.
“I’m not for one moment saying Fiona did anything wrong; I should have been more inquisitive into his home life,” he said.
However, he defended the police handling of the investigation.
“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,” Phillips told the court.