When she arrived there, Maraea noticed a car had been shunted into a fence at the property.
Her sisters hadn’t realised as they had already started drinking in a shed out the back and didn’t hear any noise above music they were playing. They weren’t aware there had been trouble between rival gang members in the street.
Angry because the fence was purpose-built so her autistic son couldn’t run away, one of Maraea’s sisters wanted to go to a house further down the road where they thought the occupants of the car — possibly Black Power prospects — had fled.
Maraea told her other sister, who was heavily pregnant, not to come with them.
They had reached the house near the Childers Road end of the street and were out on the pavement asking the occupants to remove the car when a grey ute sped past.
People in the Black Power house threw objects at the ute and it stopped alongside a physiotherapy building near the intersection of Childers Road. Seconds later the shots were fired.
Everyone on the street fled. Maraea was on the ground. Her sister lay down beside her and stayed there for over an hour.
The woman’s partner, who had been watching events unfold from their son’s room upstairs at their house, ran to Maraea’s rescue and tried to administer CPR.
But when he saw blood coming from an exit wound in her back, he knew it was futile.
At the same time, he was frantically trying to phone an ambulance and had done so three times but couldn’t make himself heard so gave up.
The jury has been told Maraea and her relatives have no gang associations. They were not involved in gang tensions in the street earlier that night.
Assistant Crown prosecutor Cameron Stuart said Maraea was an innocent bystander, simply in the wrong place at the wrong time when she was shot by Walker — a patched Mongrel Mob member. The Crown wasn’t suggesting he intended to shoot Maraea but that he had every intention of shooting at Black Power members involved in an earlier altercation in which they smashed up a Mongrel Mob car and during which Ms Grace’s hand was wounded.
It is an accepted fact in the trial that Walker’s ute was the vehicle used earlier to ram those Black Power members’ car into the fence at Maraea’s sisters’ house. The Crown alleged he and Grace had planned a further retaliatory action when they went and got his .303-calibre rifle from their house on nearby Childers Road.
The jury was told how police spent hundreds of hours trawling through CCTV footage from cameras at the Elgin Shopping Centre to piece together the movements of Walker’s distinctive grey utility vehicle — the one seen by the witnesses speeding down the street towards Childers Road just ahead of the shooting.
The Crown alleged the vehicle at that point was driven by Grace and that after stopping alongside the physiotherapy building, Walker got out the back side door behind the driver, to fire the shots.
Defence counsels challenged the CCTV evidence, saying parts of it were too indiscernible to be useful.
Walker’s counsel Shane Cassidy said if the Crown’s version of events was correct, an infra-red, motion action camera on the side of the physiotherapy building might have been expected to have captured imagery of the shooter but instead it showed only a blurred vehicle and a foot poking out an open back door. The detail was so indiscernible, it was not even possible to tell what footwear that person was wearing. Other CCTV footage of Walker that night showed him wearing gumboots.
In response, the officer in charge of the case and scene examination, Detective Sergeant Wayne Beattie, said police didn’t know why the shooter’s actions weren’t recorded — the person might have been out of the camera’s sensor range.
“It didn’t pick that up unfortunately.”
Mr Cassidy also challenged police ballistics evidence and signalled the defence might call evidence of the shooter being at the other end of the street.
Walker denies owning a gun or shooting one that night. No firearm has been located in relation to the case.
The trial is set down for two weeks.
Justice Peter Churchman is presiding.
