Here is a summary of day two’s key events: • Charl Johnson, a neighbour of the athlete, told the court he heard screams and four consecutive shots on the night in question. He said he had assumed that neighbours were being robbed, and had been surprised to learn the next day that Pistorius had shot Reeva Steenkamp. • Johnson said that after realising how close their house was to the crime scene, he and his wife had chosen to speak to a lawyer rather than the police as they wanted to keep out of the public eye. • Another witness, Johnson’s wife, Michelle Burger, again insisted that she heard the screams of a woman, rather than an anguished man, on the night of Steenkamp’s death. • Burger rejected defence claims that the loud noises she heard coming from Pistorius’s house were the sound of him using a cricket bat to smash down the door of the bathroom. She said she heard four loud gunshots, and that the intervals between each were too short for the noises to have been a bat swung against a wooden door. • Burger disputed claims that she used her husband’s witness statement as a template for her own - and denied basing her evidence on “retrospective knowledge” gleaned from later media coverage. • The defence also sought to question Burger’s evidence by arguing that Steenkamp would have been too severely injured by gunshots to have been able to scream. • Another neighbour, Estelle van der Merwe, told the court she woke to hear an argument and four noises - which could have been consecutive gunshots - on the night Steenkamp died. • The judge has reminded the media not to publish any images of witnesses after a TV channel and several papers carried a still photograph of one witness.
Posted on: Wed, 05 Mar 2014 09:30:04 +0000
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