Oscar has love for beauties, fast cars
The murder trial of the once iconic poster boy for disabled sport, Oscar Pistorius, has given the world new insights into his personal habits and lifestyle.
Paralympian Oscar Pistorius arrives at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria on the fourth day of his murder trial Thursday, 6 March 2014. Pistorius is accused of shooting dead his model girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp on Valentine’s Day last year. Picture: Werner Beukes/SAPA/Pool
The trial has revealed not only his love for beautiful women, but also for fast cars, firearms that pack an almighty punch and, allegedly, pornography on the Internet.
Statements made by Pistorius’s senior – and very expensive – advocate Barry Roux inadvertently revealed some hitherto unknown idiosyncrasies, including the fact that Pistorius apparently screams like a girl when he is very frightened.
Roux has unintentionally sparked not only many spoofs starting with “I put it to you”, but also the strange phenomenon of his own gaggle of black-robed legal “groupies”, who hog the back seats in court, breathlessly hanging onto his every word.
Pistorius’s former girlfriend Samantha Taylor, a delicate blonde girl who was just 17 years old when she started dating him, testified Pistorius always carried his firearm and cellphone with him.
She revealed an apparent pa-ranoia about intruders, with him waking up in the middle of the night after hearing a noise and then going to investigate – with his pistol.
Firearms dealer and trainer Sean Rens also referred to an incident when Pistorius went into “combat mode” after mistaking a drier in his laundry for an intruder.
Rens and Pistorius’s former friend Derren Fresco both testified about his huge love and enthusiasm for firearms.
Fresco revealed Pistorius apparently had a quick temper, confronting a traffic officer for touching his gun after they were stopped for speeding.
Rens testified Pistorius had ordered a whole arsenal of firearms – including a civilian version of an assault rifle – in an order totalling R52 500 and had already forked out R48 500, but cancelled the order a month after the shooting.
Photos of the crime scene showed Pistorius clearly loved sunglasses, with a huge selection in a display case in his bedroom and a collection of watches so expensive that some long-fingered policeman could apparently not resist the temptation and allegedly made off with two of them – one worth R150 000.
Pistorius’s house in a heavily guarded country estate, now on the market to pay for his astronomic legal costs, had the appearance of a rich man’s bachelor pad: expensively, but rather impersonally, furnished with only Pistorius’s sports trophies, electronic equipment and stacks of magazines revealing only an inkling of its owner’s personality.
The evidence of Col Mike Sales revealed that whoever used the two iPads found in Pistorius’s house searched the Internet for pornography as well as fast and powerful cars.
Always impeccably dressed in dark suits, Pistorius’s mood in court swings from impassive to extremely emotional.
He is often seen clutching prayer beads, underlining passages in a religiously themed book and once seemed to be drawing something on a notepad in front of him.
– isledl@citizen.co.za.
