The mother of Reeva Steenkamp, the woman shot dead by Oscar Pistorius, has told how the Paralympic athlete failed to acknowledge her outside his murder trial this week.
June Steenkamp, whose daughter died at Pistorius' home on Valentine's Day last year, had never met the sportsman before but attended court on Monday in the hope of looking him in the eye on the first day of the trial.
"I wanted to see him and him to see me," she told ITV News. "But he didn't look at me or anything. He just walked straight and looked ahead."
Steenkamp, who lives in Port Elizabeth in Eastern Cape province, did not attend Pistorius' bail application hearings last year but went to Pretoria for the opening of the trial.
She stared at Pistorius for long moments but he never returned her gaze. He spent most of the day writing notes in the dock and avoiding looking at the public gallery.
"The whole point was he must see me, that I'm there," she said. "I'm her mother and you know, what happened to her was terrible. And I wanted him to see me there, that I am there representing Reeva."
Steenkamp spoke from her guesthouse on Monday after hearing Pistorius insist in court that he had not intended to kill his girlfriend. He claims he shot her four times through a locked toilet door because he thought she was an intruder.
Steenkamp, 67, said she could forgive the "Blade Runner" for what he had done.
"I'm not a person who hates another person," she said. "One has to forgive otherwise I will sit with all that anger and I don't want it to burn me up. One has to forgive. We'll never forget."
She was not present in court on Tuesday, when Pistorius' composure finally broke as he heard details of Reeva's death. The defence lawyer, Barry Roux, claimed a gunshot wound to the head would have made it impossible for her to continue screaming after the final shot, as neighbour Michelle Burger claimed.
"The person with that brain damage will have no cognitive response," Roux said. "It cannot be. She could not have screamed." Pistorius bowed his head and folded his hands behind his neck, then wiped away tears with a white handkerchief.
The prosecution's second witness, neighbour Estelle van der Merwe, testified that she heard what sounded like an argument early on the morning Reeva was killed.
"From where I was sitting it seemed like two people were having an argument but I couldn't hear the other person's voice," she said through an Afrikaans-language interpreter.
The third and final witness on Tuesday was Burger's husband, Charl Johnson. He told the judge, Thokozile Masipa, that a woman's screams woke him up and that he ran to his balcony.
"At that point the fear and intensity of her voice escalated and it was clear that this person's life was in danger," he said. "That's when the first shots were fired."
scmp.com
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