A lady who was caught up in a horrific battle to the death in an alleged botched assassination recalls the moment she thought she was going to die.
When Glen Cassidy, armed with a handgun, knocked on the door, Silvana Silva and her boyfriend Michael Caposiena were inside their West Meadows house, north of Melbourne.
Biannca Edmunds, Cassidy’s 35-year-old wife, is accused of instructing him to kill Caposiena, the estranged father of her toddler son, after he showed a wish to reconnect with him.
Edmunds has pleaded not guilty in the Supreme Court of Victoria to his murder.
On Wednesday, the jury heard harrowing evidence from Ms Silva, who witnessed what allegedly happened on March 12, 2016.
‘I only had eyes to the gun. I was – I was – I was petrified when I saw the gun, I couldn’t move, I couldn’t – I couldn’t think straight, I couldn’t do anything,’ she sobbed.
She told the jury Mr Caposiena had for some reason opened the home’s security door to his killer despite being so concerned for his welfare that he had armed himself with a large kitchen knife.
Crime scene photos shown to the jury included a baseball cap found outside near where Cassidy’s body was found.
It read: ‘The Reaper’.
Just up the stairs leading to the front door, a piece of the handgun was found inside a pot plant.
The gun had broken to pieces as Cassidy pounded it into Ms Silva’s head.
‘Then he grabbed my hair and then started throwing my head, hitting my head on a step of the front porch, hitting my head several times,’ she told the jury.
‘The first was face into the ground, then he turned … then kept hitting my head on the ground.’