Pistorius trial: witness heard argument before gunshots
A witness tells court she heard a couple having a fight for an hour before gunshots rang out on the night Reeva Steenkamp was killed, and Oscar Pistorius sheds a tear on hearing about her injuries.
The second witness called to give evidence at South Africa’s “trial of the century” said she was woken by “loud voices” before 2am on the night that Reeva Steenkamp, 29, was killed.
Estelle van der Merwe, whose house is about 100 metres from Pistorius’s home, said the row went on for an hour before she heard what sounded like gunshots.
“I heard sounds, it seemed like somebody was involved in a fight,” she said.
The second day of the murder trial began in a similar manner to day one, with the defence grilling the prosecution’s star witness, Michelle Burger, before two further witnesses were called.
The Paralympian star, 27, says he shot Steenkamp by mistake at his home in Pretoria because he thought she was an intruder. However prosecutors say that it was deliberate.
Pistorius broke down in the court room on Tuesday after hearing the detail of Steenkamp’s injuries, the first obvious display of emotion since the trial began.
He held his head in his hands and wiped his eyes with a tissue, while his lawyer said that his ex-girlfriend was shot in the head, so is likely to have suffered brain damage and subsequently, would have been unable to scream after the shot rang out.
Before then, Pistorius had been scribbling intensely in a notebook, and at one stage put his hands over his ears in what looked like an attempt to concentrate.
Read more: Oscar Pistorius trial: day two – video
‘Terrified’ screams
His defence team continued to question Ms Burger, the first witness to take the stand on Monday, attempting to pull apart her evidence. She was also in tears shortly before her testimony came to an end, as she was repeatedly asked to describe what she heard.
Ms Burger said she heard a woman’s “terrified” screams and a man calling for help, before shots were fired.
Much of the defence case is based on the argument that Steenkamp was in a bathroom with closed windows and a closed door, so the screams the witnesses claim they heard, could not have come from her.
Defence lawyer Barry Roux suggested that Pistorius could have sounded like a woman in the heat of the moment – something Ms Burger rejected, along with his suggestion that she was in fact hearing a cricket bat hitting the door, rather than a gunshot.
Ms Burger was also accused of corroborating evidence with her husband Charl Johnson, because of the similarities between their accounts. She retorted this was simply because they were in the same place and heard the same thing.
Mr Johnson took to the stand in the afternoon, and told court the he heard four consecutive shots and assumed that his neighbours were being robbed. He said that he and his wife later realised how close they were to the crime scene and consulted a lawyer because they wanted to stay after from the glare of intense public scrutiny.
The trial is the first in South Africa to be televised. However, witnesses can chose not to have their faces shown. The trial was briefly adjouned early on Tuesday after it emerged that a media outlet had broadcast a photo of Ms Burger.
The judge ordered journalists to pay heed to the guidance in place, adding that those who breached it would not be treated with “soft gloves”.