Woman tells court of repeated violent abuse

A trembling woman yesterday told a court how her husband, whom she feared, aimed a shotgun at her as she was watching television with their two children because she had confronted him earlier on that day.

In an emotional testimony, Silvana Gauci gave a detailed account of violent events that ended with her husband, Carmelo, chasing her with a shotgun and firing it in her direction.

Sitting in the dock, her husband, 35 of Gharghur, bowed his head and clutched a plastic, blue rosary beads when his wife walked into the court room and chose to testify in the compilation of evidence against him which started yesterday.

Mr Gauci is pleading not guilty to trying to kill her by firing a gun in her direction on February 26 outside their Gharghur home.

Mrs Gauci told Magistrate Saviour Demicoli how they had been married since 1996 and had an eight-year-old boy and a three-year-old daughter.

One evening, three weeks before the incident, she and her sister were texting each other. The topic of their messages was a court case in which Mr Gauci's was charged with hitting her sister, who was now ready to forgive him.

At the time Mr Gauci was drinking wine and, when Mrs Gauci told this to her husband he got angry, grabbed her mobile phone, slammed it on the floor and started kicking it.

He shouted insults at her and told her that he did not need anyone's forgiveness. He grabbed the bottle of wine and was about to hurl it at her but then threw it at the television which was about six feet away from her.

Mrs Gauci explained that, on that occasion, the daughter of her brother, Joseph, was at her house.

So the next day, her brother went over to her house and asked her if her husband had beaten her again.

"On hearing this my daughter told him: 'daddy bit mummy's nose' and when I heard those words I burst into tears," she said.

Mrs Gauci went on to explain how her daughter had been referring to something that happened about a month earlier when they were in their apartment in Bugibba.

"That day I was cooking. My son and husband were in the balcony when I heard my husband point out a homosexual man to the boy and tell him obscene things about the man. I went to the balcony and asked my husband to stop speaking that way in front of the boy but he told me to go back inside and not to interfere.

"I am scared of my husband so I went back inside. But when I heard him continue to speak obscenities to the boy I got nervous and called my son to come inside.

"As I held my arms up with anger I told my husband that he was going to drive the poor boy crazy and told him to leave him alone. He told me that he had already warned me not to interrupt him when he was talking to our son.

"He grabbed me from my top, threw me onto the sofa, climbed on top of me and started strangling me with both hands. As I ran out of breath, I kicked him with my knee in his private parts and that's when he bit my nose. All this happened in front of the children," she said.

Turning back to the day when her brother Joseph went to her house, Mrs Gauci added that that day her brother wrote a letter and told her to give it to her husband when he got home from work.

Later on, she got curious and read the letter. In it her brother asked her husband not to hit her again.

When her husband got back home, at about 4.30 p.m., she sent her son to give him the letter then took the kids and went out of the house for an hour because she thought he might get angry after reading it. However, she added, she had decided to give it to him because it represented the only form of help she could get.

When she got back home, she immediately noticed that one of the shotguns that were usually hanging in the hall was missing.

The next morning she noticed the shotgun wrapped in a black sheet in his locked van. She started to worry that he may try to shoot her brother.

Then, on a Monday, her daughter had to be taken to hospital because she was dehydrated and was released from the hospital the following Friday. The doctor had ordered that the girl remains indoors for a week.

The following day, a Saturday, her husband left home in the morning and only returned in the evening. Come Sunday, he woke up and left the house again in the morning. As she started to feel trapped at home she called him to ask him where he was. He told her he was in a Bugibba bar but when she drove there, with the children, he was not there.

"When I realised that he had lied to me I thought he might be with another woman. I phoned him again and he told me he was in another bar in Bugibba. When I went there he was standing outside.

"I asked him why he was doing this to me. He was there drinking with women and I was at home alone with the children. I spat in his face and left."

But when she went home and saw the space left by the missing shotgun Mrs Gauci got scared and went to the Naxxar police station to file a report.

She explained that there were many times when her husband had hit her but she did not file a report. Once, in 1997, she had filed one after he slammed her head against a garage door but on many other occasions she was scared to do so or he stopped her from leaving the house, dragging her by the hair.

This time, after she spat at his face and humiliated him in front of people, she feared the worst as she knew that come evening he would pay her back.

"That evening he came home at 9 p.m. I was watching television on the sofa, covered in a blanket with the children. He came into the house, closed the door, walked in front of me and I asked him: 'why do you do this to me?'

"He told me: 'I don't care about you. I do what I want. Just wait and see what I'm going to do to you.'"

Mrs Gauci's voice trembled as she explained how her husband walked downstairs into the garage and went back upstairs with the shotgun that was still wrapped in the black cloth.

"He swayed and tried to unwrap the sheet and pointed the gun at me.... I ran away... The children were still on the sofa.

"I ran towards the main door and as I was making my way down the steps I heard a shot, then another two followed.

"I had parked my car right in front of the gate because I felt something might happen that evening so I got inside and drove to a field to hide and called the police for help. But I had left the children at home.

"So I drove back into my road but he was still outside and I drove away towards the Naxxar police station."

She explained that on her way, she met her husband in his car and, as he tried to approach her she saw a police car beacon in her rear view mirror.

Her husband drove off and the police car followed him. She drove around Gharghur and came across his car again but this time three police cars intervened and she felt she could safely go for her children.

The case continues.

Police Inspectors Carmelo Magri and Victor Aquilina prosecuted.

Lawyers Anglu Farrugia and Edward Gatt appeared for Mr Gauci while lawyer Joseph Giglio represented Mrs Gauci.