First day of Oscar trial adjourns

The first witness to testify was Michelle Burger, a woman who claimed to have heard screaming on the morning Reeva Steenkamp was shot dead by her boyfriend Oscar.

Burger lives at the Silverstreams Estate, which is next to Silver Woods Country Estate, the complex where Pistorius shot and killed Steenkamp.

She told the court she did not know she was in such close proximity to where the shooting happened.

She only realised it when a photographer came to her house and took photos of Pistorius’s home from her balcony.

Throughout her testimony, Burger maintained that she had heard the petrified screams of a woman coming from the nearby townhouse.

Barry Roux, for Pistorius, questioned Burger on whether she may have not mistaken Pistorius’s screams for Steenkamps’.

She responded by saying while she did not know what Pistorius’s screams sounded like, she was sure the more anxious screams came from a woman.

Burger told the court that although she also heard a man scream, it was the “fear from her (Steenkamp’s) voice that startled” her.

Burger’s cross-examination was expected to continue on Tuesday.

 Sapa