An internet check for Cavehill at 17:34 BST put Noah Donohoe on the path to his final journey minutes before he left home in south Belfast, as an inquest on Monday heard new digital evidence about the 14-year-old's last hours.
The St Malachy's College student left his home off the Lower Ormeau Road at about 17:40 on 21 June 2020, cycling towards north Belfast to meet two friends at Cave Hill. One of those friends sent him an Instagram message at 17:41 saying the plan had been called off, but a barrister for the Police Service of Northern Ireland said Donohoe would already have gone by the time the message was delivered.
That sequence matters because the hearing is trying to pin down what Donohoe knew, when he knew it and whether the cancelled meeting could have changed the route he took. The inquest has already heard that he did not have data on his phone during the final bicycle journey, despite the handset being only a week old, leaving investigators to rely on the phone itself, plus his Kindle and Chromebook, to reconstruct his movements and state of mind.
Simon Young gave a broad overview of calls, internet searches and other activity on Donohoe's devices and said that all but one of the 28 calls to and from the teenager's phone in the week before he disappeared were between him and his mother, Fiona. The only other call was a 32-second call from Donohoe to himself, recorded on the Saturday night before he vanished from a postcode a short distance from his home. Young told the hearing: “I cannot explain this.”
The digital trail went back further than the final evening. The hearing heard that, at the beginning of the month he disappeared, the schoolboy searched online for various locations, suggesting he had been looking up places before the day he set off for Cave Hill. That detail has added another layer to a case that has remained under scrutiny since Donohoe was found dead almost a week after he went missing in June 2020.
Inquest evidence about phones and search history can only go so far, and that is the tension now sitting at the centre of the case. One side of the record shows a boy making routine contact mostly with his mother; another shows unexplained digital traces, including the self-call that no witness has been able to account for. The hearing continues to examine how far technology can map the final movements of a teenager whose disappearance unfolded within minutes of a message cancelling the meeting that was supposed to bring him to Cave Hill.
