Pistorius to continue testifying
A journalist knitting a jersey joined the throng of reporters waiting outside court GD of the High Court in Pretoria on Tuesday morning for day two of Oscar Pistorius's testimony in his murder trial.
FILE PICTURE: Oscar Pistorius wipes his face during his murder trial at the high court in Pretoria, Monday, 7 April 2014. Pistorius is charged with murder for the shooting death of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp on Valentines Day in 2013. Picture: Themba Hadebe/AP/Pool
The bespectacled Los Angeles Times reporter sat on a chair next to the courtroom’s entrance, her needles clicking, surrounded by a few members of the public.
They included an elderly, neatly dressed woman who had come to support Pistorius because her grandson was in the Pretoria Boys’ High hostel, where the paralympic athlete had spent his high school career.
On Monday the court heard details of Pistorius’s family life, athletics career, love of dogs and God, and experiences of crime, and the difficulties of having prosthetic legs.
His lawyer Barry Roux, who led his evidence, sought to lay a foundation for questioning him about the morning of February 14 last year, when he shot and killed his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.
He is on trial for her murder, but claims he thought she was an intruder.
Steenkamp’s mother June was seated in the first row of the public gallery shortly after 9am. Pistorius made a discreet entrance into the courtroom, unlike on Monday when several police officers led him into the room before anybody else was let in.
Pistorius is also charged with contraventions of the Firearms Control Act. He allegedly fired a shot from a Glock pistol under a table at a Johannesburg restaurant in January 2013.
On September 30, 2012 he allegedly fired his 9mm pistol through the open sunroof of a car while driving with friends in Modderfontein.
– Sapa
