‘Children died in arson attack triggered by feud’
FOUR sleeping children were murdered after being trapped in their bedrooms when their house was torched with petrol bombs in the dead of night, a court has heard.
Zak Bolland, 23, launched the fatal attack after being involved in a feud with the victims’ 16-year-old brother Kyle Pearson, a jury at Manchester Crown Court was told.
Bolland along with David Worrall, 25, removed a fence panel from the garden of Pearson’s home, smashed a kitchen window and tossed in two lit petrol bombs, it is alleged.
One landed near the stairs, blocking the only exit to the ground floor and trapping the victims upstairs as flames engulfed the three bedroom mid-terrace house on Jackson Street, Walkden, Greater Manchester.
Demi Pearson, 15, her brother, Brandon, aged eight, and sister, Lacie, seven, sleeping in a front bedroom, all perished in the blaze, started at around 5am on December 11 last year.
“Their apparently lifeless bodies were recovered by the firefighters who attended and battled their way through the heat, smoke and flames,” Paul Reid QC, prosecuting, told the court.
Their mother, Michelle Pearson, 35, was rescued along with her youngest daughter, Lia, three, who died in hospital two days later.
Kyle Pearson, who had been feuding with Bolland, managed to escape along with a friend, Bobby Harris, who was also staying at the house.
The teen saw the light from his sister Demi’s mobile phone at the window before she coughed in the thick smoke then appeared to fall away from the window, the court heard.
The firebombing was the culmination of a series of tit-for-tat attacks between Bolland and Kyle Pearson, Mr Reid told the jury as the prosecution opened the case at the start of the trial, which is scheduled to last up to six weeks.
Bolland and Kyle Pearson had been friends until the accused’s Ford Focus was set on fire around November 25 last year, about two weeks before the fatal attack, and he blamed the teenager.
The defendant demanded £500, sending harassing text messages, including one demanding: “Fire letter box I want my £500.”
Both sides launched attacks, breaking windows in each other’s homes with Bolland threatening to fire bomb Kyle’s house, the court heard.
Bolland, his girlfriend Courtney Brierley, 20, and father-of-one Worrall all deny four counts of murder.
They also deny three counts of attempted murder relating to Mrs Pearson, Kyle Pearson and Bobby Harris. Bolland has admitted reckless arson, a charge denied by the other two.
Bolland admits he had been drinking beer and taking cocaine and admits throwing the second petrol bomb but claims he intended only to damage the house, which he claims he thought was not occupied.
Worrall claims he thought they were only going to set fire to wheelie bins and denies throwing a petrol bomb.
Brierley claims she did not know the two men had petrol bombs.
The trial continues.