Guns, drugs, revenge and murder are the key elements of the prosecution’s case laid out at the start of a Supreme Court trial as a Perth man fights accusations he shot dead an innocent person in the bedroom of a Landsdale home.
Peter Nguyen-Ha, 34, denies he is the person responsible for killing 47-year-old Ralph Matthews-Cox on January 12, 2022.
The Supreme Court of WA.Credit: Erin Jonasson
At the start of Nguyen-Ha’s murder trial on Tuesday, prosecutor Beau Sertorio told the jury Matthews-Cox was shot with a sawn-off shotgun mistakenly as Nguyen-Ha searched for a man who had stolen tens of thousands of dollars in drug money from him days earlier.
“The story of this trial doesn’t begin with the fatal shooting, it begins earlier with dangerous and deliberate choices,” Sertorio said.
“Choices rooted in the underworld of drug dealing.”
Sertorio said Nguyen-Ha thought he was buying a large quantity of methamphetamine when he drove to a warehouse in Wangara on the night of December 30, 2021.
But it was a set-up, the prosecutor told the jury. Two men ambushed Nguyen-Ha, beat him up, and stole the large quantity of cash he had on him for the purchase.
The incident triggered a series of events that were driven by “significant antipathy” on the part of Nguyen-Ha towards the man who stole from him, Sertorio said.
“He intimidated occupants of houses where they thought he would be – to exact revenge or recover money that was stolen,” Sertorio told the jury.
Sertorio alleged that, together with co-accused Matthew Gempton – who the jury was told had pleaded guilty to his part in the events and would give evidence during the trial – Nguyen-Ha “set out with loaded firearms on threatening excursions fraught with danger … terrorising people asleep in their homes and endangering innocent lives”.
The prosecution alleged Nguyen-Ha took part in four separate shootings across Perth in the days leading up to Matthews-Cox’s death.
Sertorio told the jury Nguyen-Ha shot at a home in Wanneroo and another in Girrawheen on January 4, 2022 – four days after he was robbed – as he attempted to find the man who had stolen his money.
Eight days later, at night, he allegedly arrived at the Landsdale home of Matthews-Cox.
Matthews-Cox, who had never met Nguyen-Ha, was in bed with his partner when she woke because the power had been cut, turning off the air-conditioning.
The jury was told the woman looked out of the window of her home and came face to face with a man in a mask holding a sawn-off 12-gage shotgun.
She screamed and ducked as the gun was fired through the window three times.
The woman avoided being hit, but Matthews-Cox was fatally shot as he stood up at the back of the bed.
“He was murdered in his own bedroom in his own home in the presence of his partner with children in nearby rooms,” Sertorio told the jury.
“Matthews-Cox had nothing to do with the drug deal or these men.
“[But] he was not the intended target of the shooting, neither was [his partner].
“The shooters were looking for someone else, and they got the wrong man.”
Nguyen-Ha’s defence lawyer Anthony Elliot told the jury his client was a drug user and sold drugs to support his habit, but claimed he was not responsible for shooting Matthews-Cox dead.
Elliot asked the jury to set aside their prejudices while considering the facts about how Matthews-Cox died.
He claimed it was Gempton, not Nguyen-Ha, who fired the fatal shot.
The trial continues.
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