McHugh is also charged with recklessly discharging a firearm and that being armed with a weapon, he robbed the resident Jermaine Whatuira of money.
He faces further charges, for which evidence is yet to be heard, of wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm, an alternatively-laid charge of wounding with intent to injure, conspiring with another inmate to pervert justice and using a document to obtain a pecuniary advantage.
A female co-accused has interim name suppression and is charged as a party to the robbery. She allegedly sat outside in an idling car. She is also charged with assisting McHugh to avoid arrest and conviction.
On day five of the trial yesterday, defence lawyers worked to discredit two Crown witnesses.
One of them, Andre Steven Hedge, 45, told the court he answered the door to McHugh, who wanted to see his housemate early on the morning of the alleged shooting. Mr Hedge said he went back to bed but heard a female voice and saw a light-coloured sedan in the drive with its boot ajar.
The following day, the woman now on trial visited him and said "that thing" was in his back yard, motioning with her hand that she meant a gun. She asked Mr Hedge to get rid of it and some other items she delivered later.
Mr Hedge took the gun to a mate's house in a rental car he hired that day to collect his girlfriend from Auckland. On the way back, he disposed of shoes, a sweatshirt, pants and a box of bullets by throwing them out the car window.
Mr Hedge said Mr Witeri had been a long-time friend.
He considered giving the gun to Mr Witeri's whanau but the timing was never right.
He went to police about two months later, aware that his name was being touted as a suspect for the shooting.
Cross-examined by counsel Noel Sainsbury for McHugh and Russell Fairbrother for the female defendant, Hedge admitted an 18-month prison sentence he received for other matters soon after co-operating with police had been cut by half.
Mr Fairbrother put it to him his story was a fabrication, which he had to maintain or risk being recalled to serve the other half of his sentence.
There was no actual evidence McHugh put the gun in the back yard. Mr Hedge had simply "put two and two together", Mr Fairbrother put to the witness.
The gun was valuable "currency" to Mr Hedge, who had -- through some kind of loyalty to McHugh -- obtained it by breaking into McHugh's Harris Street home while it was under police guard, Mr Fairbrother said.
Mr Hedge had the nous to do so. Burglary and firearms offences were his modus operandi and he had numerous past convictions for such behaviour.
But Mr Hedge said he had long since put that type of offending behind him.
Mr Sainsbury said Mr Hedge only went to police after three Black Power members threatened him and demanded to know where the gun was.
The second witness, Cory Grant Austin, 26, had been on 12 months bail and faced a raft of charges including several for possessing materials and equipment capable of use in meth' manufacture, when he secretly recorded an overnight drug session with the female defendant who visited him in Auckland.
Enhanced by a police sound engineer, the recordings from Mr Austin's home security system were played to the jury and explained by him in evidence.
In them the woman claimed she and McHugh had returned to the scene of the shooting in the hope he could wipe his fingerprints off a window but were forced to retreat when they spotted police there.
She claimed she was worried a man she asked to dispose of the gun might not have done so.
Cross-examined by Mr Fairbrother, Mr Austin denied the woman's remarks were merely drug-induced bravado and that he only disclosed them in exchange for a sentence reduction.
His disclosure was a matter of conscience and he was worried for his safety, he said. Only his lawyer was privy to the details of his sentencing -- he just counted himself lucky not to have been jailed.
- Gisborne Herald
