A bit part player in a bizarre suburban shopping trolley handle bashing was almost turned into the lone fall guy by his more culpable co-offenders, one of whom he considered his mother.
But Brandon Ashley Edgerton, 22, gave police a detailed account of the strange episode, keeping himself out of jail and ensuring everyone involved was brought to justice.
The former Canberra man appeared in the ACT Supreme Court via audio-visual link from his new home in Sydney on Wednesday morning.
Chief Justice Helen Murrell sentenced him to a wholly suspended jail term of 18 months, with a good behaviour order for the same length of time.
Edgerton had previously pleaded guilty, along with his co-offenders, to a charge of intentionally inflicting grievous bodily harm in February last year.
He admitted conspiring with Jennie Louise Wright, 45, and her partner Michael John Barron, 36, to assault a man with whom Wright had been exchanging "acrimonious" text messages.
The plan was hatched after Wright had already arranged for the man, who had previously lived with her in Kaleen, to come to her place to collect some things he had left there.
She told Edgerton that he was to help the victim carry a trash pack frame, which would enable Barron to take the defenceless man by surprise and strike him with a metal pole taken from the handle of a shopping trolley.
The plan worked, with Barron beating the man so badly he suffered injuries including a fractured skull, deep cuts to the scalp and face, and a chipped and bleeding tooth.
Prior to anyone being arrested, Barron and Wright exchanged a series of text messages discussing a plot to shift suspicion away from the 36-year-old.
They spoke of implicating Edgerton, to whom Wright had effectively been a surrogate mother, as the principal assailant.
But this did not come to fruition, with police obtaining recorded phone calls detailing Wright's role in the offence.
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Officers also took statements from Edgerton and the victim about Barron being the main attacker.
Barron was sentenced in October 2020 to three years and nine months in jail, with a non-parole period of two years and two months.
Wright spent more than four months behind bars on remand, but escaped further time in custody when she was sentenced to a two-year intensive correction order this February.
Chief Justice Murrell indicated on the day of Wright's sentencing that she proposed to give Edgerton a wholly suspended jail term of 18 months.
But she deferred sentencing in order to see if the 22-year-old could continue "to demonstrate rehabilitation in the community".
When the case returned to court on Wednesday, Chief Justice Murrell said there seemed to be little point in putting off any longer despite there being little information on how Edgerton was going in Sydney thanks to the harbour city's lockdown.
The judge therefore imposed the sentence she had indicated in February, when she said Edgerton had been "suffering mental difficulties" at the time in question.
Chief Justice Murrell said the young man had also endured a disadvantaged childhood, with many of his biological relatives incarcerated, while his early guilty plea and the assistance he gave authorities were consistent with remorse.
"The authors of the pre-sentence report noted that Mr Edgerton displayed some victim empathy and had expressed surprise at the ferocity of the assault," the judge said.
