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Pistorius Re-enacts Moments After Girlfriend’s Shooting
Valentine’s Message to Pistorius Paints Loving Picture Amid Grisly Testimony
(about 3 hours later)
PRETORIA, South Africa — As the prosecution ended five days of grueling cross-examination, Oscar Pistorius, the disabled track star accused of murder, rose from the dock on Tuesday to re-enact the moment he broke down a locked toilet cubicle door with a cricket bat after opening fire on it with his girlfriend inside.
PRETORIA, South Africa — It took just nine minutes on Tuesday for Oscar Pistorius’s defense lawyer to release him from anguished days and hours on the stand, and he did so with a last, loving message from the woman he is accused of murdering.
His girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, 29, a model and law graduate, was shot to death in the early hours of Feb. 14, 2013. Mr. Pistorius denies the prosecution’s charge of premeditated murder, saying he made a mistake, believing at least one intruder was inside the cubicle when he fired four shots from a handgun.
Invited to do so by his lawyer, Mr. Pistorius read out to the court in a halting voice the inscription in what the defense said was a Valentine’s card that the woman — his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, 29 — had prepared for him shortly before he shot her in the early hours of Feb. 14, 2013.
After the re-enactment, Mr. Pistorius testified that when he found Ms. Steenkamp, she was “sitting on the floor to the right. She was seated on her right buttocks with her right arm on top of the toilet bowl. Her head was on her shoulder.”
The card was addressed to him by a nickname, “Ossie,” and included the lines, “Roses are reds, violets are blue.” Inside Ms. Steenkamp had written: “"I think today is a good day to tell you that I love you.”
The prosecutor then displayed a grisly photograph of the toilet with blood smearing the bowl and a pool of blood on the floor.
She had signed it with her name and “a smiley face,” Mr. Pistorius said.
Since last week, the double-amputee athlete has faced grueling interrogation by the state prosecutor, Gerrie Nel, who has accused Mr. Pistorius, 27, of lying, dissembling, changing his evidence and offering an improbable and untrue version of events.
On that note, his defense lawyer, Barry Roux, called time on almost seven full days in the stand, starting on April 7, that produced some of the trial’s Hollywood moments as the prosecutor, Gerrie Nel — whose pugnaciousness has earned him the nickname pit bull — sought to buttress the charge that Mr. Pistorius, a onetime Paralympic track champion, had committed premeditated murder. If convicted, the athlete would face a minimum 25-year jail term.
“It’s got more and more improbable,” the prosecutor said Tuesday, shortly before he ended his cross-examination, which has frequently reduced Mr. Pistorius to tears. In a final summary of the prosecution’s case, Mr. Nel accused the athlete of intending to shoot and kill Ms. Steenkamp when he opened fire at the door. The couple had argued, the prosecutor said, and Ms. Steenkamp wanted to leave the house. “You were threatening her,” he said.
Even on Tuesday, the fifth morning of cross-examination, the combative Mr. Nel led the defendant back through the predawn hours when Mr. Pistorius, who had been an Olympic contender, loosed four hollow-point rounds into the locked door of a toilet cubicle, and then began — by his account — to suspect that Ms. Steenkamp was inside.
But Mr. Pistorius repeated that he “believed there was someone coming out to attack” when he fired. After the shooting, Mr. Pistorius said, he ran on his stumps and put on his prosthetic legs. He then tried to break down the door with his shoulder and by kicking it, but when that did not work he went to find a cricket bat. “I was crying out for the Lord to help me,” Mr. Pistorius said.
In the wood-paneled courtroom here, Mr. Nel repeated his insistence that the athlete and his girlfriend, a model and law graduate, had argued and that Mr. Pistorius had fired at the locked door knowing she was standing on the other side of it talking to him.
“I was screaming for Reeva,” he added. “I was overcome with terror and despair.”
Mr. Pistorius, 27, repeated that he had been aghast when he realized what he might have done.
“I checked if she was breathing, if she had a pulse,” he continued. “I heard her breathing and immediately tried to get her up and get her out of the toilet. I couldn’t pick her up and I scuttled around with my legs.”
Mr. Pistorius, whose legs were amputated at the knee in his infancy, said he ran to find his prosthetic legs. He tried to shoulder the bathroom door open, he said, and then sought to kick it with his prosthetic legs. He grabbed a cricket bat to smash the door down, he said.
“I managed to turn her around,” he said, adding that he then telephoned a friend to ask for help picking her up.
“I was crying out for the Lord to help me,” Mr. Pistorius said. “I was screaming for Reeva.” He added: “I was overcome with terror and despair.”
“I was crying. I was saying: ‘Baby, please hold on. Jesus, help me.' ” He called emergency services, and an operator told him to get Ms. Steenkamp to a hospital as quickly as possible, without waiting for an ambulance.
When the wood finally splintered, and he found her, “I checked if she was breathing, if she had a pulse,” he continued. “I heard her breathing and immediately tried to get her up and get her out of the toilet. I couldn’t pick her up and I scuttled around with my legs.”
When Mr. Pistorius finally managed to pick her up and carry her downstairs, Johan Stander, the manager of the gated complex where the athlete lived, arrived and told him to lay the body down.
“I was crying. I was saying: ‘Baby, please hold on. Jesus, help me.' ”
Before Mr. Pistorius ended his testimony, his defense lawyer, Barry Roux, led him through a nine-minute re-examination during which he was asked to read from what the defense said was a Valentine’s Day card given to him by Ms. Steenkamp. In it, Mr. Pistorius said, she had written: “I think today is a good day to tell you I love you.”
To the end, Mr. Nel maintained the derisive and dismissive tone with which he has pushed Mr. Pistorius into apparent contradictions, accusing him of lying, dissembling, changing his evidence and offering an improbable version of events.
On Monday, Mr. Pistorius was taken back to the early hours of the morning when he shot Ms. Steenkamp.
“It’s got more and more improbable,” the prosecutor said Tuesday, shortly before he ended a cross-examination that has frequently reduced Mr. Pistorius to tears and wails.
Mr. Nel had Mr. Pistorius relive the final intimate moments of Ms. Steenkamp’s life, as the athlete walked unsteadily on his stumps down an unlit passage from his darkened bedroom, a pistol in his right hand, and into a bathroom where he fired four rounds at the locked door of the toilet cubicle.
In a final summary of the prosecution’s case, Mr. Nel accused the athlete of fully intending to shoot and kill Ms. Steenkamp, his handgun loaded with Black Talon hollow-point ammunition. The couple had argued, the prosecutor said, and Ms. Steenkamp wanted to leave the house. “You were threatening her,” he said.
Then, Mr. Pistorius said, “I ran down the passage; I ran past my bed” to look for his girlfriend and call for help.
In the face of Mr. Pistorius’s contention that the shooting of Ms. Steenkamp had been a mistake, Mr. Nel barked at him: “So we shouldn’t blame you for having shot her. Who should we blame? Should we blame Reeva?”
“When I realized that Reeva wasn’t on the bed, that was the first time I thought it might be Reeva in the bathroom,” Mr. Pistorius said.
“No, my lady,” Mr. Pistorius said, addressing the judge, Thokozile Masipa, as is the courtroom practice in South Africa, where there are no jury trials under a system of law dating to the first arrival of Dutch settlers in the 17th century.
But, Mr. Nel said, the “first thing you would think is that you would check whether she left through the bedroom door” rather than assume she had been in the locked cubicle.
“Should we blame the government?” Mr. Nel asked with heavy sarcasm. “You must blame somebody.”
It required a “great leap” for Mr. Pistorius to go from believing that he had shot intruders to suspecting that he had opened fire on his girlfriend, said Mr. Nel, whose reputation as a pugnacious prosecutor has earned him the nickname pit bull.
“I believed there was someone coming out to attack me,” Mr. Pistorius said. In the courtroom, a grisly police photograph from the crime scene showed the toilet with blood smeared on the bowl and a pool of blood on the floor.
“You see, Mr. Pistorius, this is one of the most crucial issues that makes your version so improbable,” Mr. Nel said, seeking to establish that the athlete’s evidence on the stand was, in the prosecutor’s words on Monday, “so improbable that it cannot possibly be true.”
At the start of Tuesday’s session, Mr. Nel asked Judge Masipa to postpone the hearings until May 5, starting with an unspecified date later this week when many South Africans wind down for a four-day Easter weekend break. Judge Masipa said she would rule on the request on Wednesday.
The exchanges went to the core of a case that has drawn a global audience and transfixed many in South Africa as the hearings, which opened on March 3, focus in ever greater detail on the state of Mr. Pistorius’s mind in the early hours on Valentine’s Day 2013, when, the prosecution maintains, he killed Ms. Steenkamp in a jealous rage.
The cross-examination has left the defense reeling, and Mr. Roux set about rebuilding his case with the Valentine’s card — an image of a loving couple to counter the nightmare visions conjured by the prosecution of a raging Mr. Pistorius stomping around his darkened, upscale home, brandishing a cocked and loaded handgun as Ms. Steenkamp screamed in terror.
The spectacle of the trial also offered a stark counterpoint to the days of 2012 when Mr. Pistorius, a double amputee since infancy, not only triumphed at the Paralympic Games but also competed against able-bodied athletes at the London Olympics a month earlier, earning great adulation. On his return home, he and Ms. Steenkamp, a model and law graduate, were depicted as a gilded couple.
Mr. Roux then is likely to construct a painstaking defense, with a series of witnesses seeking to rebut Mr. Nel’s accusations. Ultimately, Mr. Pistorius is the only witness to what happened — and that is what has made the credibility of his version of events so important. “You are the only person who can give us a version of what happened,” Mr. Nel said on Tuesday.
But that glittery trajectory of success and celebrity has collapsed. Headlines that once lauded Mr. Pistorius now focus on his increasing discomfort as a hard-nosed prosecutor sets out to paint a picture of inconsistency, improbability and mendacity. If convicted of premeditated murder, he would face a minimum prison term of 25 years.
First, though, Mr. Roux sought on Tuesday to re-establish his client’s most basic argument: that the killing had been a dreadful accident. After Mr. Nel ended his cross-examination, Mr. Roux rose briefly to re-examine.
Twice during Monday’s questioning, Mr. Pistorius broke down, as he has several times in the trial, his shoulders heaving as he sobbed. On other occasions, his voice quavered as he testified and, ashen-faced, he seemed on the brink of tears.
“Could you explain to the court, if you talk about an accident, can you explain what you meant by that?” Mr. Roux said.
But his displays of deepening distress drew only a sarcastic question from Mr. Nel, who asked, “You are not using your emotional state as an escape, are you?”
“It wasn’t meant to be,” Mr. Pistorius replied.
Mr. Pistorius said repeatedly that he had not known who was in the cubicle. “I didn’t fire to attack,” he said. “I didn’t have time to think.”
“You fired at Reeva,” Mr. Nel said bluntly.
“I did not fire at Reeva,” Mr. Pistorius said in a choked, strained voice, seeming overwhelmed. The court adjourned briefly to permit him to compose himself. But when the session resumed, Mr. Nel’s insistent questions did, too, despite objections from the defense that the prosecutor was repeatedly going over old ground.
Mr. Pistorius said he had heard a sound like “wood moving,” perhaps when a door was opened or a magazine rack inside the cubicle was moved. “I wasn’t thinking,” he said. “I was screaming to the person or persons to get out.”
“You never gave them the chance,” Mr. Nel responded. “You said to them to get out, then never gave them the chance to do it.”
“I fired in quick succession,” Mr. Pistorius said. “I discharged my firearm as quickly as I could.”
So “why did you only fire four rounds?” Mr. Nel asked. “Why not empty the magazine?”
Was it just by luck, then, that the gun was pointed at Ms. Steenkamp, Mr. Nel asked.
“How could that be lucky?” Mr. Pistorius asked, choking up. “She lost her life.”
“Mr. Pistorius, you are trying to get emotional again,” Mr. Nel said.
