A witness has told the Noah Donohoe inquest that she found the schoolboy’s bike on the evening he went missing.<\/p>\n
Karen Crooks, a resident of Northwood Road in Belfast, also told the jury the storm drain where Noah’s body was found could be accessed by a small number of homes in the area.<\/p>\n
Noah was 14 when he was found dead in a storm drain in north Belfast in June 2020, six days after leaving home on his bike to meet two friends in the Cavehill area of Belfast.<\/p>\n
The inquest into his death is now in its second week at Belfast Coroner’s Court.<\/p>\n
A witness statement by Ms Crooks was read to the court today.<\/p>\n
She said on the evening of Sunday 21 June 2020, she found a bike near her car. Ms Crooks said she lifted the bike about an hour later.<\/p>\n
She said the bike was still there the following night. She then contacted police after seeing a post on social media about Noah’s disappearance.<\/p>\n
“I realised the bike described matched the bike in my driveway,” she said.<\/p>\n
Ms Crooks was then questioned by Nessa Murnaghan, barrister for the Department of Infrastructure.<\/p>\n
The witness told the jury an area of wasteland where the culvert was located could be accessed through a side gate at her property.<\/p>\n
Ms Murnaghan said there was a 1.8m metal fence around the area of the park containing the storm drain.<\/p>\n
Ms Murnaghan suggested the only other way of accessing the area was to “trespass” through Ms Crooks’s property, or that of a neighbour.<\/p>\n
Ms Crooks said she had searched the area around her property after Noah went missing, and took part in a community search. She said she did not search the culvert.<\/p>\n
The witness was shown a picture of the culvert. Ms Murnaghan said the metal bars across the entrance to the culvert was known as a “debris screen”.<\/p>\n
Ms Crooks said her five-year-old son had been able to fit through the bars but had not entered the tunnel.<\/p>\n
Ms Murnaghan asked the witness if she believed it was important the hatch to the culvert remained unlocked in case a child had got swept into it.<\/p>\n
Ms Crooks said: “That is not something I would ever have thought about.”<\/p>\n
The inquest continues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A witness has told the Noah Donohoe inquest that she found the schoolboy’s bike on the evening he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":128479,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[9,10,13,14,6,11,12,15,16,5,7,8,65,66,67],"class_list":{"0":"post-310082","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-featured-news","11":"tag-featurednews","12":"tag-headlines","13":"tag-latest-news","14":"tag-latestnews","15":"tag-main-news","16":"tag-mainnews","17":"tag-news","18":"tag-top-stories","19":"tag-topstories","20":"tag-world","21":"tag-world-news","22":"tag-worldnews"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115979432974608138","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310082"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310082\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/128479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}