Home invaders face sentence after shooting 13-year-old girl

Home invaders face sentence after shooting 13-year-old girl

A Canberra girl who was shot during a home invasion said she wanted to calm her sister with a teddy bear in the moments after the shooting but her hands were covered in blood, a court heard Tuesday.

Reece Salcedo, 20, and Nathan Stretton, 23, had burst into the home on February 20 last year searching for a set of car keys they believed had been stolen by someone who stayed at the house.

In the ensuing chaos, the 13-year-old girl was shot in the buttocks and her mother's boyfriend shot in the arm.

In a victim impact statement tendered at the pair's sentencing hearing on Tuesday, the 13-year-old girl said she had tried to go upstairs away from the fight.

But the gun went off, and she freaked out when she realised she had been hurt. She was screaming and crying.


She said when her sister woke up she was also crying.

The girl said she tried to give her sister a teddy bear to calm her but there was too much blood on her hands and she did not want it.

The girl said everyone at school found out about the shooting from news articles and people kept asking what had happened.

The girl's mother said in her victim impact statement that the shooting had a massive impact on her family.

"I'm not in the same scene as these people," she said.

"You don't come to someone's house with weapons, and after being told children are inside, still barge in and put everyone at risk."

She said the person they wanted, her partner, was not even living at the house.

"Having to go into court and give evidence, and relive everything was just f--ked up," she said.

Her boyfriend said he saw one of the men standing over the girl with a gun and ran at him.

"[The girl] screaming was the worst thing I have ever heard as I thought they had shot her, severely bad," he said.

He said he too was shot in the arm and he said there was blood everywhere. He had dislocated the shoulder of his other arm while trying to beat one of the men with a pole.

Stretton and Salcedo were found guilty of recklessly inflicting grievous bodily harm, aggravated burglary, intentionally inflicting grievous bodily harm, and threatening to cause grievous bodily harm.

Prosecutor Anthony Williamson told the ACT Supreme Court at the sentence hearing that the girl's youth and the injury to her as a child made the home invasion more serious.

He said Salcedo and Stretton had several opportunities to stop what they were doing and once they realised there was a child present, if they had any decency, they would have retreated.

But in court on Tuesday, Stretton spoke, not from a witness box but from his seat between two corrections officers, that "we weren't aware" the girl had been a child, pointing to her height as more than six feet tall.

Both Stretton and Salcedo had pleaded not guilty at trial and denied it was them who had committed the home invasion.

Mr Williamson also said the pair had shown no real evidence of remorse.

Salcedo and Stretton's barristers had pointed to the pair's youth in their sentencing submissions.

James Stewart, for Salcedo, said the man had a supportive family and a future once he left prison.

And Richard Davies, counsel for Stretton, said his client had come to realise the negative impact of his use of drugs.

The two men have been in custody since early last year.

They will return to court on October 26 for sentence.

Most Viewed in National