Noah was a keen basketball player. Photo: PeacePlayers Northern Ireland.
Noah captured on CCTV on York Road without his rucksack and minutes before he disappeared. Photo: BBC.
A person holds a missing poster of Noah during the search in June 2020. Photo: Niall Carson/PA Images via Getty Images.
Noah was a Catholic, mixed-race boy cycling in a predominantly Loyalist, Protestant, white area of a city that is still recovering from 30 years of a deadly sectarian war known as the Troubles. Only a few weeks before Noah went missing, 15-year old Flynn Maguire, also a pupil at St Malachy’s College, was attacked while cycling by a mob of teenagers in the same area. Flynn’s mother claimed it was a religiously motivated attack. The discovery of Noah’s laptop at a homeless shelter opposite his family home fuelled public doubt about the police’s version of events, that Noah had simply fallen, sustained a head injury and then gone missing. Yet police maintained that Paul, later handed a 3-month prison sentence for stealing the rucksack, while being an opportunist thief, could not be connected with Noah’s disappearance, because he was caught on CCTV in another part of the city at the time he went missing.The rumours and suspicion, fuelled by allegations of police incompetence and bizarre circumstances, did not stop, they spiralled.
The storm drain in Seaview Park behind Northwood Road where police say Noah entered the system. Photo: Niall Carson/PA Images via Getty Images.
A photo of Noah with his mother Fiona as his funeral cortege arrived at Saint Patrick's Church in Belfast on July 1, 2020 Photo: Niall Carson/PA Images via Getty Images)
A mural on the Lower Falls Road in Belfast, one of several murals in the city depicting the Donohoe's fight for more information about Noah's death. Photo: Peter Curran.
“We need a new investigation. It's so obvious to us how badly that investigation was done. We are not accepting their narrative at all, there is not one word I accept. I’m absolutely disgusted. It's insulting to Noah. It’s disrespectful.”
Fiona Donohoe (centre), Noah's mother, and his aunt Niamh (left) follow his coffin as it is carried into Saint Patrick's Church in Belfast. Photo: Niall Carson/PA Images via Getty Images.
