A RAID on a Croxteth home by police looking for the Rhys Jones murder weapon sparked a flurry of phonecalls, the trial heard.
Police stormed an address in L11 at 8.50pm on Sunday September 30, 2007, in the hunt for the gun used to kill the 11-year-old, the jury at Liverpool Crown Court has previously heard.
Yesterday, the court was told that action set off a chain of calls between the mother of one of the defendants, the alleged killer Sean Mercer, and the prosecution’s star witness who was in America on holiday at the time.
The jury heard evidence that once the door was kicked in at the home of the witness Boy C, the chatter began. Using phone billing records, the jury were told that, within five minutes of the raid, the mother of the defendant Boy K phoned her son’s phone and one belonging to Mercer.
Neil Flewitt, QC, prosecuting, said it was accepted that Boy K did not have his phone with him that day.
It was claimed that whoever did have Boy K’s phone then rang Mercer’s mobile before Mercer himself tried to contact Boy C, who was on holiday in Florida with his family. Mercer, it is alleged, tried to ring Boy C’s sister to get in contact with him.
Mr Flewitt has previously told the jury the repeated phonecalls from Mercer to Boy C in America after the raid “confirm his [Mercer’s] anxiety to discover whether the police had found the gun he had used to kill Rhys Jones.”
The Crown allege that Boy C was summoned to the home of defendant Boy M within half-an-hour of Rhys being shot on Wednesday, August 22, 2007. There, Mercer is alleged to have given Boy C the murder weapon and told him to hide it, which he did.
On September 30, police raided Boy C’s home and found a .455 Smith and Wesson revolver the prosecution say is the gun used to shoot Rhys.
The jury yesterday were also taken through a series of calls from phone billing records that started in the hours before the shooting and went through until afterwards which the prosecution say is proof of contact between the defendants and various others in the chain of events.
The phone calls were presented to the court in the context of the CCTV that the jury saw on Tuesday, playing out, the prosecution say, the chronology of what happened that night.
