Pistorius says he carried Steenkamp downstairs to try to save her after mistakenly shooting her in his bathroom. The former police colonel GS van Rensburg described the early part of the investigation after he arrived at the scene around 30 to 40 minutes after prosecutors say Pistorius killed Steenkamp in the pre-dawn hours of 14 February The prosecution says Pistorius intentionally killed Steenkamp in the upstairs bathroom after a loud argument and then tried to cover it up by saying he thought the year-old model was a dangerous intruder.
To the year-old it felt like his world's guiding light had been extinguished. He has the dates of her birth and death tattooed on his right arm. Sporting activity was the only thing that could distract me from such a loss. His aunt Diana stepped in to play a greater part in the upbringing of Oscar, Carl and Aimee.
She says Sheila was such a devoted mother that her death required a "huge adjustment at a difficult time developmentally" for the three teenagers. Oscar has continued her legacy of helping others.
A year after his mother's death came the third life-changing event - he shattered his knee on the rugby pitch. It came at a time when he had been working hard on his general fitness, to complement his rugby and water polo. One trainer, Jannie Brooks, has spoken about how Pistorius used his gym in Pretoria for six months - boxing, skipping and doing press-ups - before he realised he had no legs.
But after the injury, he was back with the same medics who had carried out the amputations when he was a baby, and his recovery was slow. It was during his rehabilitation, supervised by the University of Pretoria, that he was advised to take up sprinting to help the knee joint recover.
At the same time, Hatting - now working for a firm in the US - was working on new, lighter prosthetics and he invited Oscar to fly to the US to try the Flex-Foot Cheetah blades, manufactured by Ossur. Three weeks after taking up sprinting, Pistorius ran his first m race. With his father watching in Bloemfontein, he won the race in a time faster than any double amputee had achieved before - A star was born. Eight months later, he won the m gold at the Paralympics in Athens and his life changed forever.
It was at this moment - September - that the world woke up to his talent and personality. Before long he began running against non-disabled athletes, first in a Golden Gala m race in Rome in , finishing second, and then in Sheffield where, in very wet conditions, he finished last.
The question now began to be asked whether his prosthetics gave him an advantage. It was a huge blow when, the following year, the world governing body for athletics IAAF concluded that they did, and banned them.
But he fought the decision and won an appeal at the Court of Arbitration for Sport CAS in Lausanne, paving the way for him to compete in the summer Olympic Games in Beijing later that year. Failing to qualify, he set his sights on London in , where in due course he became the first track and field athlete to compete in both Paralympic and Olympic Games.
Not only was he a very good athlete, says Garrett, one who broke down the barriers between disabled and non-disabled sport, he was a good-looking young man full of vitality, ready to take on the world. Pistorius has always strongly rejected the suggestion that his fight to compete in the Olympics meant he regarded Paralympic sport as second-rate. He says he just believed it was unfair to exclude disabled athletes from taking part, if they were good enough. I am simply an athlete and sprinter.
Despite his relatively privileged background, his achievements made him a hero to many South Africans, even if they came from different communities. He was a unifying figure. But as the sponsorship deals and media appearances multiplied, Garrett was not the only person to notice a change in the man he knew. In , Pistorius had stormed out of a BBC radio interview after taking exception to a question about his fight to take part in non-disabled athletics.
Then there was the outburst at the London Games, when he lashed out at Alan Oliveira. Another South African Paralympian, Arnu Fourie, told a journalist he had to change rooms in the athletes' village because Pistorius was shouting on the phone so much.
Other acquaintances concur that his character subtly altered. After a formal hearing, the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that Pistorius did not have an advantage and could legally compete in IAAF races with the prosthetics. Oscar Pistorius's fight to overcome his disability made him a hero to many and he picked up sponsorships from Nike, Oakley Sunglasses, and other high-profile firms. The team did not medal, but Pistorius did win two golds in the meters and the 4x meter relay at the Paralympic Games which followed.
However, things took a shocking turn a few months later: on February 14, , Oscar Pistorius was arrested and charged with murder after shooting and killing his girlfriend, the model Reeva Steenkamp , inside of Pistorius's home in Pretoria.
In bail hearings over the following week, a magistrate ruled that the charge should be upgraded to premeditated murder, although he said the charge could be downgraded later. Pistorius was released on February 22, and commanded to return for trial on June 4, A Pretoria court indicted him on murder and weapons charges on August 19, Steenkamp's birthday, as it happened. After a lengthy trial and deliberations, Pistorius was found guilty of culpable homicide, the South African equivalent of manslaughter, on September 12, Then, on October 21, , a judge sentenced him to five years in prison.
Pistorius served about a year in prison and then was released to house arrest. In fact, only 5 per cent of South Africans own firearms. On this Masipa was unhesitant. You think you are unique in this regard? Think again. Disability or weakness is something you can suffer, but never own. It is no excuse. She is a universalist, moved by a compassion that manages at once to be specific to South Africa while taking in the vulnerable — women, children, the elderly, all those with limited ability — everywhere.
Nor am I convinced that she was above all driven by the desire to avoid being seen as enacting revenge justice on a rich white man though it is surely the case that, as a black judge, she too was on trial. There are guns, and there is thinking. That is what made me fire.
Out of fear. I did not have time to think. I did not intend to shoot at someone. I shot out of fear … I fired my firearm before I could think.
If he shot because he thought he was in danger of being attacked, then he clearly had time to think. Had he wanted to kill an intruder, he explains, he would have shot higher up towards the chest.
It is in the split second between thought and non-thought that you kill. Would a reasonable person have taken steps to guard against that possibility? The answer to both questions is yes. Who is this reasonable person? It might also be because its category of reason, not least in the realm of violent crime, is a shape-changer.
What was reasonable in would not necessarily be reasonable today. There is also an issue of language involved, as the attribution of guilt hangs on the finest linguistic discriminations, in particular on auxiliary verbs. Very well. Have I ever seen one? Might I ever have seen one? Am I ever to see one. Ought I ever to have seen one? Or can I ever see one? If I never have, can, must or shall see a white bear alive; have I ever seen the skin of one? Did I ever see one painted? Have I never dreamed of one?
Did my father, mother, uncle, aunt, brothers or sisters, ever see a white bear? What would they give? How would they behave? How would the white bear have behaved? Is he wild? This is language as speculative decay, losing its grip on reality which — as we have known since Saussure and Sterne — it has never had anyway.
In one famous passage in Proust, the narrator — at no small physical risk — hoists himself onto a ladder and peers through a fanlight into the shop into which the Baron de Charlus and the tailor Jupien have disappeared after a mutual seduction in the courtyard. Not just the scene of a killing, but the first place you go in order to wash away the traces of the crime. In Western culture bathrooms are places where we submit the roughage of our inner and outer worlds to the regimen of the controlled and the clean.
An obsessional culture on the other hand — Western culture — is guilty, unsettled in the discriminations it most earnestly wishes to police the distinction between men and women, or between black and white.
But there is a limit to such control. When Mark Gevisser was attacked in a private home with two close women friends, he started by believing their lives were saved by the respect they paid to the black intruders. It is random and it is chaotic, and even if your reasonable behaviour lessens the odds of your being hurt or killed, it guarantees you nothing.
You have no control over when, and how, you will die. Once you understand this, you accept that life is a gift. We could say that it was his tragedy, although far more the tragedy of Reeva Steenkamp, that, prey to a fantasy of omnipotence in which the whole world colluded, he tried to take control of whatever he could: his body, his mind, his women, his guns. If there is a lesson I take from all this, it is that we should not disavow our hatreds in a futile effort to make ourselves — to make the world — clean.
Someone — a race, a sex — has to take the rap. Macmillan, pp. St Paul already had them high.
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