A grandmother staggered back from her front door after being shot by a hitman and screamed out to her daughter before collapsing on the floor, a jury has been told.
Alexandra Klimovitch told a Supreme Court jury in Newcastle on Wednesday she had been feeding her baby son and watching TV when there was a knock on the door just after 8pm and a man yelled out her mother Stacey's name.
Ms Klimovitch said the man called out the name like he had been practising it before coming to the door of their Stockton home in the June 2021 incident.
She said her mother had been playing games on her phone in the kitchen when she went to open the front door.
“It was very quick ... I remember there was a big flash in my peripheral vision and a big bang,” Ms Klimovitch said during a trial of the alleged getaway driver for the hitman.
“She still had hold of the door and was standing there and she said, ‘I’ve just been shot'."
Ms Klimovitch, who still had her baby son in her arms, told her mother to keep breathing as she put her baby down and called triple zero.
She said her mother tried to get away from the front door before collapsing face down on the floor.
Mrs Klimovitch, 61, was pronounced dead at the scene after having suffered a single gunshot wound to the chest.
Stephen Garland, the alleged getaway driver for the hitman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, has pleaded not guilty to one charge of murder and an alternative charge of being an accessory after the fact to murder.
Prosecutor Brett Hatfield told the court Ms Klimovitch’s ex-partner Stuart Campbell recruited the hitman and Garland to participate in a joint criminal enterprise to murder Mrs Klimovitch.
Campbell had been in a dysfunctional relationship with Ms Klimovitch and was excluded from his son’s birth in March 2021, with his name left off the child's birth certificate.
Mr Hatfield said Campbell’s motive for having the older woman murdered was the “significant animosity” he had developed towards Ms Klimovitch's mother.
But defence barrister Tom Hughes said Garland had no idea the hitman was planning to kill Mrs Klimovitch when he drove him to Stockton.
Mr Hughes said Campbell had asked Garland to give the hitman a lift as a favour for helping him to arrange some rental accommodation.
He said Garland had been duped by Campbell to be the driver and did not know he was being dragged into a "nefarious" murder plot.
Mrs Klimovitch told a friend she would not let Campbell near her daughter and the baby, and would “protect them at all costs”, according to an agreed set of facts tendered to the court.
Campbell was arrested and charged with murder but died by suicide while in custody in March.
The alleged hitman will stand trial separately at a later date.
The trial involving Garland continues.
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