Within minutes, Keira Street would lose its innocence. For in broad daylight a lone gunman with an axe to grind turned the public street into a bloody shooting gallery.

First there was a warning shot. People froze.  Seconds later Vedran Ravnjak, a 33-year-old, lay in the gutter clutching his stomach.

He had been sprayed with pellets from the gunman’s second shot. He was dead. Nine innocent bystanders were wounded, including an 11-year-old boy. 

The gunman, it would later emerge, was Mr Ravnjak’s former friend, Zlatan Popovic.

Moments before the shooting, Popovic had spotted Mr Ravnjak and called out to him. 

As Mr Ravnjak walked toward him, Popovic pulled a shortened double-barrel shotgun from a knapsack and discharged it, wounding the nine bystanders with pellets.

Nurse Robert Davies had been walking along Keira Street in a northerly direction, a metre behind the gunman.

“My attention was towards the gun ... he carried it in his left hand, I didn't think it was real for some reason.” 

​Mr Davies tried not to draw attention to himself and “took cover between two cement pot plants”. 

After the second shot, the gunman met another man in the middle of the road and the pair walked casually to a white four-wheel-drive, which had been parked on the opposite side of the street.

Mr Davies gave first aid to the injured man outside the Monsoon Restaurant and then went to help Mr Ravnjak.

“He was (still) holding his stomach and making murmuring sounds,” he said.

Despite the casualties, Popovic’s legal team argued the killer only had eyes for one man.

In the lead-up to the shooting, Mr Ravnjak had made between 30 and 50 telephone calls to Popovic threatening to kill his mother and son believing Popovic had been having an affair with his former de facto wife.

Justice Barry O'Keefe said he accepted that the cumulative effects of the threats and harassment had led Popovic to lose self-control. 

But he dismissed defence suggestions that the shooting had no degree of premeditation.

“With all the circumstances surrounding the shooting, I am of the belief that the prisoner had intended to kill Mr Ravnjak when they confronted each other in Keira St," Justice O'Keefe said.

In sentencing Popovic to 10 years’ jail, the judge said the “intelligent man” had adapted to prison life well, had good prospects of rehabilitation and was unlikely to offend again. 

Popovic did not live up to the judge’s hopes.

In 2014 he copped a 26-year sentence, this time for ordering the contract killing of Dragan Sekuljica at Splashes nightclub in 2007. 

Mr Sekuljica, a father of two, was shot as he left the nightclub to get into a taxi. Wounded, he ran back into the club and was chased by the gunman who fired further shots, one at close range to the back of his head.

This time there was no family dispute or emotional revenge. The victim, a father of two, was killed for money.

Flick through the gallery above to read archived stories on the case. With thanks to Wollongong City Library for archive retrieval.