Oscar prayed for Reeva to live – witness
Oscar Pistorius wept and prayed as he tried to revive Reeva Steenkamp after shooting her, his murder trial heard on Thursday from a doctor who witnessed the scene.
South African Paralympic athlete Oscar Pistorius sits quietly on his own after arriving at the High Court in Pretoria, South Africa on Tuesday, 4 March 2014. Pistorius stands trial for the 2nd day for the premeditated murder of his model girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp in February 2013. Picture: Kim Ludbrook/Pool
“He was praying. He was talking to God … He was making promises to God, He was trying, maybe I don’t know, to get atonement,” Johan Stipp, a radiologist and neighbour, told the High Court in Pretoria.
“He looked sincere to me. He was crying, there were tears on his face. He was actively trying to assist her,” he said under cross-examination from Pistorius’s lawyer Barry Roux.
Stipp, who went to Pistorius’s house to offer medical assistance after he was woken up by gunfire, said he felt for a pulse but it was soon clear to him that Steenkamp was beyond saving.
“I opened her right eyelid. Her pupil was fixed, dilated and her cornea was already drying out. To me it was obvious that she was dying. I noticed blood in her hair and brain tissue mingled with that.”
Stipp was the first doctor to arrive at the house.
He said he found Pistorius kneeling over his blonde girlfriend, with his fingers in her mouth and his other hand on a bullet wound in her leg.
Pistorius words to him were: “I shot her. I thought she was a burglar and I shot her.”
He said he asked another man at the scene where the gun that killed Steenkamp was, because the disabled sprinter seemed so distraught that he feared he might harm himself.
“I was afraid Oscar would hurt himself,” said Stipp.
He was the fourth neighbour to testify, since Pistorius pleaded not guilty to premeditated murder on Monday, that he was disturbed by screams followed by shots on the night Steenkamp died.
Like a married couple who had taken the stand, he told the court he believed heard both a man and a woman
“She sounded fearful. Of someone who was in fear of his or her life,” said Stipp of the cries that woke him and his wife around 3am on Valentine’s Day last year.”
“She sounded to be emotional, anguished, scared almost scared out of her mind, I would say.”
Roux put it to Stipp, as he had with the married couple who testified for the State, that the cries they heard all came from Pistorius and not from Steenkamp.
He would prove to the court that Pistorius screams in a high-pitched tone that sounds like a woman’s, when he feels anxious, he repeated
“I put to you that it does. Decibel tests were done.”
In addition, he argued, Steenkamp’s head wound had caused such brain damage that she could not have uttered the screams the witnesses heard.
The defence lawyer has used rigorous cross-examination to cast doubt on the testimony of all witnesses who have taken the stand in the past four days.
He accused husband and wife Charl Johnson and Michelle Burger of corroborating their evidence to compromise his client and claimed that both the couple and Stipp confused the sound of a cricket bat on wood for gunshots.
Pistorius contends that he used a cricket bat to break down the locked door through which he had fired four shots, fatally wounded Steenkamp.
On Thursday morning, Roux grilled Johnson about notes he had made after the shooting, and demanded to know why there were different drafts. It would suggest that the story was altered to suit his wife’s, he said.
“That is what it’s all about,” said Roux, theatrically waving a copy of Johnson’s statement across the court room.
The soft-spoken witness did not waver.
“It’s the nature of how I do my work,” said Johnson, who is Afrikaans-speaking. I try to improve the quality of the work that I write… to use proper English and grammar.”
Afterwards, prosecutor Gerrie Nel moved to defend Johnson’s credibility.
He used his re-examination to show that though the witness had heard during Pistorius’s bail hearing that there were only four shots, he had not changed his statement to reflect this but kept to his original, more vague recollection.
Pistorius is also charged with illegal possession of a firearm and ammunition, and two counts of discharging a firearm in public.
He allegedly fired a shot from a Glock pistol under a table at a Johannesburg restaurant in January 2013.
The State on Wednesday focused on this episode, calling professional boxer Kevin Lerena to describe how Pistorius had made a friend take the blame after a gun went off in his hand under a table at Tasha’s in Melrose Arch.
During Pistorius’s bail hearing, Nel had honed in on what happened in the restaurant and suggested it showed Pistorius to be reluctant to take responsibility for his actions.
– Sapa
