I had Reeva with me – cousin

“Tx for all the messages of support. Reeva really was with me. Lets keep her voice alive. #ReevaSteenkamp #Love,” Kim Martin tweeted at 6.59am to her 238 followers.

Replying to tweets, she said Steenkamp was with her and that made it “very easy”.

She told a tweeter to “be strong and don’t stop spreading Reevas message of love and compassion.”

Martin took the stand on Wednesday and told the court about her loving and sociable law graduate and model cousin.

She had been in court on various days since the start of the trial.

“I knew I had to be here, I had to do this, I had to do this for Reeva, I owe her this,” an emotional Martin said on Wednesday.

“I know Reeva needs a voice. My way of looking at this to pay her back for what she meant to me.”

Martin said she spoke to Steenkamp’s parents June and Barry on Tuesday night because she was worried she would disappoint them when she testified.

She said Barry Steenkamp told her that she could never disappoint them and that she had their blessing and needed to be “Reeva’s voice”.

Martin said an announcement on the radio that Pistorius shot his girlfriend was the first time she heard of Steenkamp’s death, while she was stuck in rush hour traffic with her husband.

She remembered screaming and then hoping and praying that it was not Steenkamp.

Martin would continue her testimony on Thursday.

On September 12, Pistorius was convicted of culpable homicide on for the Valentines Day 2013, shooting of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp in his Pretoria townhouse. The court found him not guilty of murdering Steenkamp.

Pistorius shot Steenkamp through the locked door of the toilet, apparently thinking she was an intruder about to emerge and attack him. She was hit in the hip, arm, and head.

Pistorius was found guilty of firing a pistol under a table at Tasha’s restaurant in Johannesburg in January 2013. He was found not guilty of shooting through the open sunroof of a car in Modderfontein on September 30, 2012, and of illegal possession of ammunition.

– Sapa

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