The mother of a western Sydney man allegedly murdered over a pair of fake wireless earphones was packing for a family holiday when her son left the house for the last time.
Ross Houllis, 28, was bashed on Valentine’s Day 2020 before dying in hospital three days later.
Abdul Karaali has pleaded not guilty to murder, denying involvement in the attack preceding Houllis’ death.
CCTV footage of him being attacked was played to the jury on Wednesday afternoon.
The vision will form a contentious part of Karaali’s trial.
His barrister said the Crown will not be able to prove its circumstantial case that the man allegedly seen high-kicking Houllis before stomping on his head and chest is Karaali.
“What you are being presented with are clearly poor quality images,” he said.
“The prosecution’s evidence on its whole is of poor quality.”
Houllis’ mother watched from the court’s upper gallery, wiping tears during the footage of her son being attacked.
She earlier told the court she was packing for a family trip to Hawaii when her son left the house to sell a pair of wireless headphones shortly after 9pm on February 14, 2020.
He had arranged to meet the purported buyer in the car park of a shopping centre about two minutes away from the Houllis home.
Houllis and his younger brother Matthew had been selling earphones through Facebook Marketplace for some months, and were down to their last two pairs, their mother said.
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Matthew Houllis told the court he was at the gym when he got a call from his brother.
“He was just asking me if he should go and where he should meet them, either IGA or at our house,” he said.
The pair had a number of phone calls, the last of which Ross Houllis ended, telling his brother the buyer was calling and he had to go.
When Houllis’ daughter arrived home about 10pm her mother asked if she had seen Ross.
“She said ‘no’, and then we started to hear sirens so I ran out the door,” she said.
She recognised her son’s shoes on a man being loaded into an ambulance.
Crown prosecutor Philip Hogan told the jury on Wednesday that along with the CCTV, evidence of Karaali’s mobile phone connecting to different mobile phone towers would also be presented in an attempt to place him at the scene.
“It gives a general idea of the area where the phone is located but it can’t be more specific than that,” Hogan said.
Along with the vision and phone records, a DNA profile matching Karaali was found inside a ute seen on CCTV on the same street Houllis was bashed, Hogan said.
During a search of Karaali’s house, a mobile phone was found on top of a cupboard, missing its SIM card, and had been used to search for information about the incident in the days after it occurred, Hogan said.
On Tuesday, he said the beating was in revenge for Apple Airpods being bought from the Houllis brothers without realising they were fake.
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