West Dubbo house attacked with projectile

Those were the words of angry mother Katie Hall after a slingshot projectile smashed the front window of her West Dubbo home at the weekend, narrowly missing her children who had been sitting on a couch inside.

Mrs Hall ran into the room just after 1pm Saturday after she heard her two older children cry out in shock when something hit the window.

Drawing the curtains apart, the family saw two children standing out the front.

"I ran outside and yelled at them to come back and they ran off," Mrs Hall said.

"One of them would have been about 13 years old and he pulled his shirt over his head so I couldn't see who he was. The other would be lucky to be nine years old."

Determined to identify the children who had attacked her house, Mrs Hall took off on foot after them, chasing them along Leavers Street and into Wattle Street.

When one of the thongs she was wearing broke Mrs Hall removed her footwear and kept running after the two boys.

I got to the corner of North Street and saw the same two kids - the little one had a slingshot and was firing it at a parked car," she said.

"He saw me and bolted. Just after, a neighbour told me they'd gone in the direction of McDonald's in West Dubbo."

The incident was reported to police and Mrs Hall provided them with a description of the two boys.

The taller one, Mrs Hall said, had been wearing a dark cap, black shirt and black shorts with red sides.

The shorter one was wearing a white shirt, orange pants and white cap.

Both had dark hair and dark complexions.

Mrs Hall said she had lived in Leavers Street for seven years and, despite her home being one of those that Australia Post withdrew mail delivery services to after a spate of attacks on posties by children in the area, she had had very little trouble at all.

It was not the first time something had been thrown at her house, she said, and showed the Daily Liberal a collection that had been hurled into her yard over the years.

Mrs Hall said she did not have reason to think she had been targeted, but had discovered a slingshot in her backyard the day before.

While she hoped insurance would cover the cost of the window repair, Mrs Hall said that paled into insignificance when her children could have been seriously injured or killed.

Mrs Hall later found a small metal circle she believed may have been fired from the slingshot, and said in terms of the danger posed to occupants of the house, there was little difference between an attack of this type and a drive-by shooting.

"My kids were sitting right on the other side of the window," she said.

"Ten minutes later my toddler would have been out on the front lawn."

Mrs Hall said she had a question for the parents of the child who had fired the slingshot.

"What are you going to do about your kids roaming the street, endangering lives and vandalising other people's property?" she said.

"If my kids muck up, I'll take them to the police station. What are you going to do?"