A 28-year-old woman was shot “deliberately and mercilessly by a man who entered her home intending to kill”, the trial of five alleged gang members for murder has heard.
Ashley Dale was shot dead in the early hours of Sunday 21 August last year by a gangmember who was in a dispute with her boyfriend, Lee Harrison, Liverpool crown court heard.
Harrison was not at Dale’s home on Leinster Road in Old Swan, Liverpool, when a man kicked in the door armed with a Skorpion submachine gun and fired more than a dozen bullets, one of which hit Dale in the abdomen “causing catastrophic damage”.
She died shortly afterwards in the yard behind her house after police were unable to resuscitate her.
The prosecutor Paul Greaney KC said the attack was orchestrated by a gang, made up of the defendants Joseph Peers, Sean Zeisz, Niall Barry, James Witham and Ian Fitzgibbon.
He said: “Niall Barry, Sean Zeisz and Ian Fitzgibbon dispatched Joseph Peers and James Witham, armed with a Skorpion submachine gun, to kill Lee Harrison at his home and to deal with anyone that got in their way, leaving behind no witnesses.”
Greaney added: “When Ashley Dale saw James Witham, she screamed, shouted: ‘Get the fuck out’ and attempted to run for her life. She fled, pursued by James Witham, into the dining room in a desperate attempt to reach the back door. As she did so James Witham opened fire with the submachine gun.”
Witham moved through the house firing shots that were left embedded in the walls and floors of the hallway, dining room and kitchen of Dale’s home, Greaney said.
“James Witham then walked upstairs and into a bedroom, where he fired five bullets into the wall. He did that, the prosecution suggests, to send a firm message to Lee Harrison. That message was that he, Lee Harrison, had been the principal target of this attack and he too should be dead, along with Ashley.”
While it was Witham who pulled the trigger, which the defendant admitted when pleading guilty to a manslaughter charge, Greaney said it was an attack planned by his co-defendants, who are all charged with murder.
The jury saw messages written by Dale, a council worker, about a month before her murder in which she described “terrible anxiety” over fears Barry would come to her house as part of a feud he had with Harrison.
She also told a friend she felt unable to go to another friend’s wake because of rising tensions between Barry and Harrison, which had pulled in other friends on either side of the row.
A message written by Dale and shown to the jury read: “I just have a bad feeling about everything ... It’s horrible. Me heart’s in my mouth constantly.”
Messages from less than a fortnight before her death showed that Dale did attend the wake but was escorted inside by a friend, and that she felt unsafe entering alone after hearing Barry was also there.
Dale’s death was one of three fatal shootings in Liverpool in one week in August 2022, including that of nine-year-old Olivia Pratt Korbel, who was murdered in her own home by a drug dealer, Thomas Cashman.
The five defendants deny murdering Dale and also deny conspiracy to murder Harrison and conspiracy to possess a prohibited weapon, a Skorpion submachine gun, and ammunition.
A sixth defendant, Kallum Radford, denies assisting an offender.
