Ex-officer tells inquest he thinks about Noah Donohoe tunnel ordeal all the time

A retired police officer has told an inquest he still thinks all the time about Noah Donohoe being “naked and afraid” in an underground tunnel.

Retired inspector Menary, who previously managed the PSNI hazardous environment search (HES) team, said he had never encountered a case before where someone had managed to travel such a distance under the ground in a storm drain tunnel.

The ex-officer described the “horrendous” conditions in the tunnel network in which the body of Noah was discovered in 2020.

The inquest into the death of the schoolboy at Belfast Coroner’s Court, which is being heard with a jury, is now in its fourth week.

Noah, a pupil of St Malachy’s College, was 14 when his naked body was found in a storm drain tunnel in north Belfast in June 2020, six days after leaving 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.

Continuing his evidence on Wednesday, Mr Menary told the jury that his team had resumed a 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.

He said: “We were looking for anything strange or out of the ordinary within the culvert.”

Mr Menary searched in an area underneath Seaview football pitch, the home of Crusaders FC.

Describing the conditions, he said: “It’s freezing cold. My flood suit at the time is sealed, but doesn’t fully seal around the waist, so when I was lying down the water was coming over the top of me and up into the bottom of my jacket.”

Counsel for the coroner Declan Quinn asked what it would have been like for someone to be in the tunnel without protective clothing.

Mr Menary said: “Somebody doing that with no clothes would have been absolutely horrendous and you would have been absolutely frozen.”

Mr Quinn asked about the physical exertion which would have been needed for someone to travel from the entrance to the culvert system at Linear Park to the stretch of tunnel which the retired officer had searched.

Mr Menary said: “The water would have continually come over you and you would have been frozen.

“You begin to get disorientated because of the cold, you begin to slow down and you just continually move on that section underneath the football pitch.”

The retired officer said it was “heartbreaking” to think Noah had been in the tunnel.

Mr Menary told the jury that his search team had by Thursday afternoon lifted manhole covers on either side of the tunnel where Noah’s body was later found, but discovered no evidence he was in the tunnel.

The search was then suspended due to rising tidal levels in the tunnel.

The retired officer said several of his colleagues then came to work on their day off on the Friday to resume the operation.

He said the level of silt in the tunnel was quite deep which prevented a camera from being deployed and would have impacted his team’s equipment.

Mr Menary said it was then decided to bring in the police dive team to continue the search and the HES team was stood down.

Mr Quinn asked Mr Menary if he now believed his team had carried out the operation in as “professional and as urgent a matter as you could”.

Mr Menary said: “I do.”

He said the majority of people on the team had children around Noah’s age.

He said: “The longer you work on this job, the more personal it does become.

“Eventually when we heard following Noah’s recovery there was a real sense of sadness that they had found Noah in the system.

“I suppose, as the search went on, there was a thought, he’ll never be found here, it’s too far gone, it’s too far down the system.”

Mr Menary said his reaction was a “real sense of sadness” because he knew what Noah had gone through.

He said: “We had taken those steps that Noah had taken and there was a real amount of sadness.

“There was a sense of relief too that Noah had finally been found and brought home.”

Mr Menary said there was also “frustration” within his team that they had not located Noah.

Mr Quinn then asked: “Have you ever experienced in your career a person of any age, particularly a child, entering a culvert system like this, at its start point, naked and managed to travel to such a location downstream?”

The witness replied: “Never.”

Asked about the emotional impact on his team, Mr Menary said: “We reflect on all the things we do, and we would be robots if we didn’t.

“Being down there and actually taking that route, we had lights, we had everything else.

“To think of somebody doing that alone, naked, afraid in the dark, I still think about it today.”

He added: “I can’t even begin to imagine the hurt, the difficulty, the daily pain that all this would cause, I think about it all the time.”

The inquest continues.