Andrew Howells, 26, and Cooper Taylor-Richardson, 25, both of Numurkah, pleaded guilty in Shepparton County Court to charges of home invasion and aggravated assault.
Taylor-Richardson also pleaded guilty to possessing cannabis.
The court heard the pair went to a Mooroopna house, knocked on the door, and pushed their way into the home when the door was opened by the female occupant at 8.30pm on June 18 last year.
Howells then hit the woman’s partner in the face, before that man ran out the door, jumped a fence and ran to a service station where he sought refuge while the shop worker called police.
Prosecutor David O’Doherty told the court the woman at the house was a relative of Howells’ former partner.
After the assaulted man left, Howells pulled down the bandanna that was covering his face and said he was there because the man he assaulted “hit” her.
When police searched Taylor-Richardson’s home the following month, they found cannabis in his bedside draw.
Mr O’Doherty told the court that when he was interviewed by police, Howells said of the man he assaulted that he “was trying to teach him a lesson” and that he didn’t stand for him hitting his partner – the woman at the house – or scaring children.
Mr O’Doherty said Howells was on a court-imposed adjourned undertaking to be of good behaviour at the time of the offence on charges that included threatening to inflict serious injury.
The home invasion also occurred just days after the end of an 18-month community corrections order, which had followed six months in jail.
Taylor-Richardson had only appeared in court once before, on charges that included assault, where he was given an adjourned undertaking to be of good behaviour.
The woman who lived at the house had her victim impact statement read to the court.
In it, she told how she still felt unsafe everywhere she went and how she was still “being approached by others blaming me for what happened”.
Howells’ defence counsel accepted that the incident would have been “an incredibly frightening experience” but said there had been an incident at the house when his former partner had been there with their children and the children had been scared.
The defence counsel told how Howells had been abused as a child and had used alcohol and drugs from an early age.
She said the offending related to the abuse and social disadvantage in his own childhood.
She told how Howells had abstained from drugs for 12 months while on a community corrections order at one stage, but had relapsed into benzodiazepine use and drinking alcohol after his mother was diagnosed with cancer, and his relationship broke down.
The defence counsel said that the “protection of the community would best be served” if Howells was jailed but given a “lengthier than normal parole period”.
Taylor-Richardson’s defence counsel told the court her client’s father was injured in a workplace accident when he was 10 and he had to go to live with his mother in what she described as an “unstable family environment”.
He started using cannabis and drinking alcohol in his teens, later also moving on to using Xanax.
However, she said when he was held in custody for a few days after being arrested on these offences, he stopped drinking alcohol, and in January this year stopped using drugs after self-referring to the GV Drug and Alcohol Support Service.
She said the offending took place “during a significant level of intoxication” by Taylor-Richardson.
The defence counsel also argued Taylor-Richardson was not known to the victims, did not make threats and didn’t do the physical assault to the man, instead being there “as a threat”.
“He’s there as muscle,” the defence counsel said.
Mr O’Doherty, however, said both men had agreed to go to the house, it was pre-planned, and they had disguised themselves.
The pair will be sentenced later in June.
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