Source: Gold Coast News
A MURDER committal into a shooting death at a Burleigh fast food restaurant is expected to begin today in the Southport Magistrates Court.
Samuel Friedman, 24, is charged with murdering of Richard Shane Doherty in front of the McDonald’s restaurant on the Gold Coast Highway at Burleigh on August 15 last year.
He is also facing charges over the unlawful wounding of a second man.
Mr Friedman was granted bail earlier this year on the condition he post a $400,000 surety.
Crown lawyers in the Supreme Court in Brisbane argued against bail, alleging the shootings were in relation to a drug deal gone wrong.
Source: CourierMail News
THE Gold Coast’s dark and dangerous underbelly has been laid bare by a woman who drove the getaway car in a slaying outside a McDonald’s restaurant.
Drug-fuelled high-rise parties, violent home invasions, prostitution, bikies and guns swapped for gold chains were part and parcel of life on the Glitter Strip for Rachel Bertomeu and her friends.
“Our whole lives were a party every day,” Bertomeu told Southport Magistrates Court yesterday. “We’d wake up and do it all again. This went on for months. Everyone was taking lots (of drugs).”Bertomeu has been given immunity from prosecution to testify at a committal hearing into a double shooting outside McDonald’s at Burleigh Heads last August, which left one man dead and another wounded.
Samuel Mark Friedman, 25, is charged with murdering 34-year-old Richard Doherty and unlawfully wounding 26-year-old Ben Matthews.
Bertomeu, 29, told the court that all three men were part of a group of friends who partied together in the months before the shootings.
The shapely brunette told of “hotel-hopping” parties bankrolled by prostitution and $7000 drug deals. While one friend worked as a prostitute, Bertomeu said she only took bookings and did “rob jobs” – where she would lure a client into bed only to steal money.
She also took part in a drug-fuelled home invasion in which she stole a laptop, cash and drugs while her male associates bashed the victim.
Bertomeu told the court that she and her friends had been “going hard” (on drugs) for about a month leading up to the shooting. She said Friedman, Doherty and Matthews had all been partying at a Surfers Paradise highrise on the night before the shooting.
Doherty and Matthews left to get some drugs and Bertomeu had driven Friedman to look for them. She said punches were thrown and shots fired at a Miami service station and the McDonald’s restaurant.She said she saw “an orange flash” but did not realise Friedman had a gun until she saw it on his lap after the shooting. She told the court he later gave her the gun which she wrapped up and gave back to him at a park.
Ben Matthews was expected to be a key witness in the court case but has since died of a drug overdose.