The mother of Olivia Pratt-Korbel, who was shot dead in her home in Liverpool last August, has described seeing a bullet wound in her daughter’s chest after a masked gunman opened fire into her home.
Cheryl Korbel recounted how the nine-year-old was “gasping for breath” after being shot by a man, alleged to have been 34-year-old Thomas Cashman.
In a video played during the murder trial at Manchester crown court, Korbel said she was shot in the hand while trying to stop an intruder entering her home, and initially did not know that the same bullet had hit Olivia.
Korbel said: “She said something, I don’t know whether it was ‘mum’, but when I turned around she was just sat there still on the bottom or the second stair.”
Korbel tried to shield her daughter as Joseph Nee burst through her front door followed by a gunman wearing a balaclava. Nee, a stranger to the Korbels who was being pursued, was shot in the leg and torso but survived the attack.
Korbel said: “The door flew open, I was huddled over the baby [Olivia] because I couldn’t lift her by myself because of my arm.”
Helped by her son Ryan, Korbel managed to carry Olivia halfway up the stairs. “She was heavy, it was like she wasn’t helping me,” she said in the video. Her elder daughter, Chloe, phoned an ambulance.
Korbel added: “There was blood everywhere. I knew it wasn’t right. I lifted her top and that’s when I knew she’d been shot in the chest. She was gasping for breath and I was screaming at her to stay with me, the ambulance will be here in a minute. I was just screaming ‘please Liv stay with me’.”
Olivia had slipped out of consciousness, Korbel said. “Her lips had gone blue. I said to [a neighbour]: ‘She’s gone.’”
The jury also heard from several witnesses who told police about “the worst screaming I’ve ever heard in my life” after the shooting on 22 August last year.
A neighbour, Adele Maher, described seeing from her bedroom window a man dressed in “all black from head to toe” chasing another man.
“He was running with an arm stretched out in front of him,” she told police. “Seconds later I heard another two loud noises followed by the worst screaming I’ve ever heard in my life. I think it was women screaming, hysterical, out of control. It threw me into an instant panic because I knew then something bad had happened.”
She added: “I could hear Chloe, my neighbour Cheryl’s daughter, on the phone to someone. She sounded distraught. She was saying: ‘Where are they? Where are they? She’s dying.’ I realised then that something must have happened at Cheryl’s house.”
Another neighbour, Olivia Heffron, said she heard a “completely inconsolable” Korbel screaming “she’s dying, she’s been shot in the chest” and begging people on the street for help. “I have never seen anyone in such a state of distress like that before,” Heffron said.
A further witness, Libby Boylan, described seeing a police officer carrying a little girl in what looked like bloodstained pyjamas out of the house.
Andrew Telfer, another neighbour, said Nee “sounded hysterical like he was about to start crying” as he begged the man with the gun for mercy, shouting “please lad, don’t, lad”.
Nee ran up the drive to the Korbel home after seeing the door ajar. The gunman hesitated at the end of the driveway and lowered the gun, before chasing Nee into the house, the witness said.
After the attack, Nee was “covered in blood and mumbling words” out on the street, Telfer said. Nee was picked up in a car and taken to hospital before police arrived.
Cashman, of West Derby, denies Olivia’s murder and four other charges – the attempted murder of Nee, wounding with intent to inflict grievous bodily harm on Korbel, and two counts of possession of a firearm with intent to endanger life.
The trial continues.
