Oscar Pistorius told a packed courtroom that he shot his girlfriend to death by mistake, thinking she was a robber. The prosecutor called it premeditated murder.
The double amputee said in an affidavit read by his lawyer at his bail hearing that he felt vulnerable because he did not have on his prosthetic legs when he pumped bullets into the locked bathroom door. Then, Pistorius said in the sworn statement, he realized that model Reeva Steenkamp was not in his bed. “It filled me with horror and fear,” he said.
He put on his prosthetic legs, tried to kick down the door, then bashed it in with a cricket bat to find Steenkamp, 29, shot inside. He said he ran downstairs with her, but “She died in my arms.”
(PHOTOS: Oscar Pistorius On and Off the Track)
Prosecutor Gerrie Nel on Tuesday charged the 26-year-old athlete and Olympian with premeditated murder, alleging he took the time to put on his legs and walk some seven meters (yards) from the bed to the bathroom door before opening fire. A conviction of premeditated murder carries a mandatory sentence of life in jail.
The Valentine’s Day shooting death has shocked South Africans and many around the world who idolized Pistorius for overcoming adversity to become a sports champion, competing in the London Olympics last year in track besides being a Paralympian. Steenkamp was a model and law graduate who made her debut on a South African reality TV program that was broadcast on Saturday, two days after her death.
The magistrate ruled that Pistorius faces the harshest bail requirements available in South African law.
Nel told the court that Pistorius fired into the door of a small bathroom where Steenkamp was cowering after a shouting match. He fired four times and three bullets hit Steenkamp, the prosecutor said. “She couldn’t go anywhere. You can run nowhere,” prosecutor Nel argued. “It must have been horrific.”
Pistorius sobbed softly as his lawyer, Barry Roux, insisted the shooting was an accident and that there was no evidence to substantiate a murder charge.
“Was it to kill her, or was it to get her out?” he asked about the broken-down door. “We submit it is not even murder. There is no concession this is a murder.” He said the state had provided no evidence that the couple quarreled nor offered a motive.
(MORE: ‘Blade Runner’ Oscar Pistorius Charged with Murder of Model Girlfriend)
Nel rebutted: “The motive is ‘I want to kill.’”
There were affadavits from friends of Pistorius and Steenkamp read out by defense lawyer Roux in the bail hearing. The statements described a charming, happy couple. The night before the killing, they said, Pistorius and Steenkamp had canceled separate plans to spend the night before Valentine’s Day together at his home.
As details emerged at the dramatic court hearing in the capital, Steenkamp’s body was being cremated Tuesday at a memorial service in the south-coast port city of Port Elizabeth. The family said members had arrived from around the world. Six pallbearers carried her coffin, draped with a white cloth and covered in white flowers, into the church for the private service.
June Steenkamp, the mother, said the family wants answers. “Why? Why my little girl? Why did this happen? Why did he do this?” she said in an interview published Monday in The Times newspaper.
Outside the court, several dozen singing women protested against domestic violence and waved placards urging Pistorius be refused bail. “Pistorius must rot in jail,” one placard said.
South Africa has some of the world’s worst rates of violence against females and the highest rate in the world of women killed by an intimate partner, according to a study by the Medical Research Council. Another council study estimates a child or woman is raped every four minutes. While homicide rates have dropped, the number of women killed by current or former partners has increased, said the council’s Professor Rachel Jewkes. At least three women are killed by a partner every day in the country of 50 million, she said.
Steenkamp campaigned actively against domestic violence and had tweeted on Twitter that she planned to join a “Black Friday” protest by wearing black in honor of a 17-year-old girl who was gang-raped and mutilated two weeks ago.
What “she stood for, and the abuse against women, unfortunately it’s gone right around and I think the Lord knows that statement is more powerful now,” her uncle and the family spokesman Mike Steenkamp said after her memorial. He said the family had planned a big get-together at Christmas but that had not been possible. “But we are here today as a family and the only one who’s missing is Reeva,” he said, breaking down and weeping.
Pistorius was born without fibula bones and had them amputated when he was 11 months.
The man known as the Blade Runner because of his running prostheses has lost several valuable sponsorships estimated to be worth more than $1 million a year.
On Tuesday, the athlete was ousted from a pro-gay campaign being launched in Cape Town, organizers said. In a video axed from the campaign, Pistorius says “You don’t have to worry. You don’t have to change. Take a deep breath and remember, ‘It will get better.’”
Rico says nah, he put four rounds through the door just to scare her... But Time wouldn't be a nice, liberal magazine without a little zing by Ollie John at gub ownership:
The paralympian Oscar Pistorius has been charged with murder by a South African court following the death of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, from gunshot wounds at his home within a gated Pretoria housing estate. The woman sustained wounds to her head and the upper body, and was reported to have been shot four times. A 9mm pistol was recovered from the scene.Rico says that it's odd to see such an obvious truth in a mainstream news article: A gun is the only practical tool for protection against violence.
According to Gunpolicy.org, there are just under six million licensed firearms in South Africa, which has a population of around fifty million. In a nation notorious for its high level of violent crime, and where many people live in fear of home invasions, most South Africans who keep guns do so for personal security. A Daily Mail article in 2011 noted that Pistorius kept a machine gun and a pistol in his bedroom.
South Africa’s Firearms Control Act came into force in 2000, following a decade which saw a huge spike in gun-related homicides. People applying for gun licenses now undergo rigorous checks, which take into account issues like a person’s temper, recurring issues of violence, and abuse of alcohol. Interviews with spouses are also carried out. Also, a bill which seeks to give police extra powers to arrest anyone carrying a dangerous weapon in public was introduced into parliament this week.
“We’ve got good gun legislation,” Alan Storey, chairman of anti-firearm group Gun Free South Africa (GFSA), told Time. “What has been less than perfect has been the implementation of that gun legislation.”
There is a huge backlog in gun license applications, putting the body that administers licenses under pressure— which can lead to negligence. An example: in March of 2012, it was reported that notorious underworld figures Mikey Schultz and Nigel McGurk had been reissued with firearm licenses, despite having confessed to the 2005 murder of mining tycoon Brett Kebble (Schultz and McGurk were given immunity from prosecution for the murder because they agreed to testify against the alleged mastermind).
Asked whether gun control is adequate, Gun Owners of South Africa (GOSA) executive Wouter de Waal told Time: “The state attempts to control guns. It’s a lengthy and costly process to obtain a gun license. On the other hand it’s dead easy to buy an AK-47 off the streets. That’s the problem with gun control: it only controls law-abiding people.” There are around two thousand guns stolen from legal gun owners in South Africa every month, said Alan Storey. “There needs to be a sense of outrage that the legal gun owners are the pool where illegal guns come from,” he said.
The specific crime Pistorius stands accused of is increasingly rare in South Africa. A study carried out by the South African Medical Research Council showed that, between 1999 and 2009, the proportion of gun homicides committed by a woman’s “intimate partner” (defined as her current or ex-husband or boyfriend, same-sex partner, or a rejected would-be lover) almost halved. The study notes that this is most likely due to the gun control legislation implemented since 2000.
Storey feels that the gun lobby in South Africa invokes narratives similar to those propagated by the National Rifle Association in the US. “I believe, and GFSA believes, that it actually uses the crime situation in South Africa as a smokescreen for its real ideology. And if you’re familiar with the NRA in America, their ideological basis for carrying firearms is the right to be armed, according to their Constitution, to defend yourself against the government. But that policy would never fly in this country, around the sensitivity of being anti-government, but they would hide behind the crime level.”
Regarding the use of guns for self-defense, GOSA executive member Richard Boothroyd told Time: “A gun is the only practical tool for protection against violence. There is a great deal of that in South Africa, which has one of the world’s highest levels of homicide, rape, and robbery. But let me stress that I do not accept that crime should exceed any specific level before gun ownership is considered justified. I do not accept that it needs to be justified at all, but aside from that, the most peaceful of societies are not free of violence, so a gun is a sensible insurance anywhere, anytime.”
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