Kesgrave shooting trial: Schoolboy 'blasted by shotgun from 1.5m away'

The shooting took place shortly after the victim left his home on the first day of the new school year

A 15-year-old boy was blasted in the face by a double-barrelled shotgun from a distance of less than 1.5m (4.9ft) as he walked to school, a court heard.

He was wounded in Kesgrave, Suffolk, on 7 September as his school reopened fully for the first time since the first national Covid-19 lockdown.

A 16-year-old boy, who cannot be named, denies attempted murder and four other charges at Ipswich Crown Court.

Jurors were shown the gun, seized from a silver car driven by the defendant.

The over-and-under Beretta, found on the vehicle's rear seat, had a spent cartridge in the top barrel and a live cartridge in the bottom barrel.

The weapon's safety catch was applied when officers found it.

Jurors have heard the wounded boy was airlifted to Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, where he was left with "devastating and life-changing injuries" after suffering a stroke and had been "partially paralysed".

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The court has heard the injured boy and the defendant had been at primary school together.

The mother of the injured boy said she told her son "you're going to be OK"

Firearms expert Mark Robinson said he examined photographs of the boy's facial injury and carried out laboratory testing, firing the gun from different distances into a card to see the pattern of the pellets.

"The further you are from the muzzle of the gun, the wider the pellets will have spread out," he said.

Based on this testing, he told jurors: "The very instant the trigger was pulled, the muzzle of the gun was somewhere between 0.75m (2.46ft) and 1.5m (4.9ft) from the victim's face."

Mr Robinson said that testing with weights found that the force required to pull the trigger to fire the top barrel was between 3lbs 12oz (1.7kg) and 4lbs 4oz (1.9kg).

"It's not, by any stretch of the imagination, a hair trigger," he said.

The trial continues.