Authors: Mandy Wiener
The challenge for Nel was to convince the court to allow the state to play the video. When the prosecutor had earlier asked Oscar whether he knew what a zombie stopper was, he said he had no idea:
| Nel: | Have you never been in the presence of any person using the word âzombie stopper'? |
| Accused: | Not that I can recall, M'Lady. |
| Nel: | Have you ever seen a video of yourself in the presence of people, referring to a âzombie stopper'? |
| Accused: | I have never seen a video of myself where someone in the video has referred to a âzombie stopper' in my ⦠as far as I can remember, M'Lady. |
| Nel: | If there was such a video on Sky News, showing you shooting and somebody saying, talking about a âzombie stopper', would you be surprised? |
| Accused: | I am ⦠I would not be surprised. I am saying I cannot remember. You can show me a video like that and I am in the presence of that person, then I can agree with that. |
| Nel: | Gladly. Can we show that video please? |
Nel's response to the witness's request to watch the video was as quick as an angler's backward jerk on his rod when a darting line indicates the fish has taken the bait. The prosecutor and Roux sparred over the admissibility of the video, but it was eventually allowed to be played.
Introducing the video of Oscar at the shooting range served a dual purpose. Not only did it allow the prosecutor to rattle Oscar, it also showed his attitude towards firearms. In the footage, he and his friends appeared flippant, revelling
in the sight of the aftermath of the exploded melon. This was contrary to the claim he presented to the court, that he bought a firearm to protect himself. He was fearful of crime and felt particularly vulnerable and wanted to be in a position to ward off a threat if he was ever placed in such a situation. But his desire to own a firearm extended beyond protection. He was in the process of amassing an assortment of weapons as a collector. So did his love of weapons and eagerness to use them feed off his vulnerability? Or was this vulnerability merely an excuse to try to explain why he fired four shots through a closed toilet door?
It was at Sean Rens's shooting range that Oscar was filmed shooting the Smith & Wesson revolver at the watermelon. Rens was also the arms dealer who had procured the same model of firearm for Oscar, along with five other guns. Oscar was in the process of obtaining a firearm collector's licence. Rens said Oscar had approached him requesting a specific type of revolver â the S&M 500 â and they discussed firearms in general. âHe had a great love and enthusiasm for them, My Lady.'
An invoice submitted to the court listed the items of which Oscar was waiting to take delivery. The document showed that R48 500 had already been paid towards the R52 500 bill for six firearms and 580 rounds of ammunition:
⢠Smith & Wesson 500 revolver
⢠Vector LM6 (a civilian and law-enforcement semi-automatic variant of the R6 assault rifle)
⢠Winchester Defender pump-action shotgun
⢠Mossberg Maverick pistol-gripped pump-action shotgun
⢠Mossberg semi-automatic shotgun
⢠Smith & Wesson .38 Special revolver.
The deal was cancelled after the shooting of Reeva.
Rens also handled Oscar's competency exams for his firearms, in which he was required to fill out a questionnaire that proposed several scenarios to the future gun-owner and tested how the person understood he or she should act in relation to the law. In one scenario:
You are at home alone in an isolated area far from police or security services. You happen to look out of your window, and you see two strange men jumping over your wall and make their way towards your house. You do not know these men and you are not expecting any form of visitor, because it is very late at night. Have they committed an offence that justifies the use of lethal force against them?
Oscar correctly answered âNo', he would not be justified to use lethal force.
The scenario was then changed, putting the intruders inside the gun-owner's home and in the process of stealing personal items. Could lethal force be used? Oscar, again, correctly answered âNo'.
The scenario went even further, that the burglars threaten to kill the home-owner who is standing behind a locked security gate. âCan you discharge a firearm at them because you fear for your life?' Once again, the athlete correctly answered âNo'.
Only when the scenario changed to put the home-owner in direct contact with the intruders, with no security gate to protect him, and the assailants armed with a knife and a firearm and advancing towards the home-owner, did Oscar correctly state that he may discharge his firearm and use lethal force to defend himself.
The hypothetical scenario had an uncanny resemblance to the situation Oscar claimed he had found himself in on the morning he shot and killed Reeva. Of course, this immediately raised questions about his conduct in relation to the law. It was not in dispute that Oscar fired his weapon blindly through the locked toilet door. He made no attempt to establish the identity of the intruder and he was not under any direct threat of attack. It was quickly noted in public discourse that it's a lot easier to know the law when sitting for an exam; it's considerably different when faced with a perceived threat in one's home.
In his competency exam, Oscar also correctly listed some of the legal requirements that must be met to justify using lethal force. Nel asked Rens to read them in to the record. âAttack must be against you, it must be unlawful. It must be against a person.' None of these requirements had been met in the shooting in question.
Rens discussed various other aspects related to the exam that required the future firearm owner to understand the terms of the law and the safe operation of a weapon. By all indications, Oscar was a competent and knowledgeable firearm owner who met the requirements to acquire more weapons.
But, as Rens would confirm, Valentine's Day was not the first time Oscar had
unholstered his firearm and prepared to confront an intruder in his house. This incident was further confirmed by Oscar's tweet on 27 November 2012, which was deleted from the athlete's account after the shooting:
Nothing like getting home to hear the washing machine on and thinking its an intruder to go into full combat recon mode into the pantry! waa
With Rens in the witness box, Nel wanted to know what Oscar had told him about the washing machine incident he had tweeted about. âHe went to what we call code red or combat mode. In other words, draw his gun and go and clear the house as anyone would if they heard a noise inside the house, and when he came to the source of the noise, it was the laundry or something in the laundry, M'Lady,' he said. Rens said he taught self-defence and how to clear a house from room to room in a series of colour codes.
There were other incidents too.
Oscar's friend Dexter Azzie told a BBC3 documentary about a separate incident that occurred when he was spending the night at the athlete's home just before Christmas. âIt was quite a hot evening so I woke up to put a fan on and after bumping it over ⦠it made quite a loud bang ⦠within a minute, he ran outside. He didn't have his prosthetic legs on. He was on his stumps. He had his 9 mm in his hands. He asked if everything was alright. I responded “Yes” and then he went back to his room.'
Another occurred just days before Reeva's death when the couple was at Justin and Samantha's Johannesburg house watching a movie. Oscar got a fright and âlevitated' off the couch.
âIt was the Sunday before Reeva was killed. They had come over to our house and we were watching a movie,
Zero Dark Thirty
or some or other war movie,' recalls Greyvenstein. âOz had fallen asleep. There was some shooting scene and it woke him up and he got a fright. He jumped up off the couch and he ran through to the dining room and you could just see he had got a fright. He had to walk around and calm down. He just started pacing to calm down. Justin went up to him and said, “Calm down, it's just a movie. Chillax.” Reeva just thought it was funny. She laughed and said, “Are you alright?” She was still awake and he had fallen asleep next to her.'
Roux also sought to dispel the suggestion Nel was making that Oscar's intention to obtain a collector's licence and to obtain several and varied kinds of firearms meant that he was irresponsible.
âThen I am not a collector of firearms, so I do not know, but your experience
with people collecting firearms, would they be seen as upstanding people, as reckless people?' asked Roux.
âNo, they would be upstanding people, M'Lady.'
âIt is just that you have some people that have a love for firearms and collecting them and others not?'
âCorrect,' said Rens, before adding that there is no connection between being reckless and being a firearm collector and that in his experience the contrary is true.
The gun-dealer's evidence shed further light on Oscar's enthusiasm for firearms of all shapes and sizes: he owned a 9 mm pistol, but was in the process of acquiring the most powerful revolver; he was buying two shotguns, including a semi-automatic â as fast as he could pull the trigger it would fire; and he had his sights on a semi-automatic assault rifle, the same as that used by the South African Police Service.
The evidence also showed that Oscar was familiar with self-defence techniques and appeared to know what techniques to employ when dealing with a threat in the home, and further that he knew the legal obligations placed on a gun-owner related to when exactly deadly force may or may not be used.
For someone to be so fearful of crime and to believe that someone had broken into their home in a secure estate, they must have had a valid reason. The state called Boschkop police station's Warrant Officer Hendrik Maritz from the Crime Information Office, whose job was to analyse the crime reported in the area and identify trends and hotspots.
Using Oscar's identity number, Maritz first established that the accused had never opened a crime-related case at the police station. Oscar said he had never opened cases because in one instance he did not have insurance so thought there was no need. He also said he did not trust the police, believing that they would not give the matters any attention or be able to do anything about the cases.
Maritz analysed the incidents of crime over a three-year period in the Silver Lakes area and plotted it on a map using red, yellow and blue spots as a record of all crimes committed, specifically house robberies and armed robberies. A single dark-blue dot on the map indicated the Valentine's Day murder docket currently being tried in court.
A closer look at the records, and narrowing them down to the Silver Woods estate, showed that besides the shooting at Oscar's house, the only other reported house robbery or burglary was on 24 October 2011.
Roux made the point that Maritz could only inform the court of the crimes that were reported to the police â he would obviously have no record of unreported incidents, like those to which his client would claim to have fallen victim. The policeman also confirmed that, in general, living in a secure estate did not mean a person was immune to crime â on the morning of this shooting police were dealing with an armed robbery at an estate elsewhere in the capital.
On the face of it, the numbers showed that Oscar lived in a secure complex
with very few incidents of crime. Even the neighbourhood in which he lived showed very few occasions of violent crime. His terror at believing an intruder had broken into his home seemed at odds with the reality of living where he did.
So what did Oscar fear so terribly that drove him to react the way he did â going into âfull recon' mode and pumping four bullets into a closed door? What did he believe was lurking beyond and what consequences did he fear?
It has many names. âThe fear of the other', âthe imagined intruder', âthe invisible witness'. It is the faceless, nameless criminal without a conscience or a consequence who perpetrates the violent crimes that feature in the country's media.
It is what drives many South Africans into high-security enclaves such as Silver Woods, with round-the-clock security, guards who patrol 24 hours a day, alarm systems, laser beams, emergency response cars and guard dogs. In some instances, it is what drives individuals to arm themselves with personal handguns or an arsenal of firearms.
Generally, though not necessarily in relation to Oscar, this has been referred to by some writers as â
die swart gevaar'
(âthe black danger/peril').
In the run-up to Oscar's trial, South African crime novelist Margie Orford wrote about this force, in a column for the
Sunday Times:
This imaginary body, of the paranoid imaginings of suburban South Africa, has lurked like a bogeyman at the periphery of this story for the past year. It is the threatening body, nameless and faceless, of an armed and dangerous black intruder.
The figure of the threatening black stranger has driven many South Africans into fortress-like housing estates, surrounded by electric fences, armed guards and the relentless surveillance of security cameras.
This figure is the reason almost every middle-class home has a panic button on both sides of the double bed in the master bedroom, a red button that will summons armed guards to the house within minutes. So, the accepted logic goes, of course a man would simply shoot.
Orford asked the questions: What is this fear? Where does it come from?
The estate where Pistorius lived and where Steenkamp died is the contemporary version of the laager. Except this one is very expensive; it has state-of-the-art security; it had no history of crime, let alone violent home invasions.
But for a year this man who was not there, the one who Pistorius did not shoot, has lurked in the shadows of this relentlessly covered story. Is it a kind of possession, this fear of an intruder that compels a man to unthinkingly and without hesitation fire a gun through a locked door? Or is it nothing more than the reclaiming of the old white fear of the swart gevaar (black peril) as Pistorius' only defence against the charge of the premeditated murder of Steenkamp? What is this irrational fear that has sunk so deep into the psyche?
It is perhaps the most atavistic of white South African fears. Under Apartheid, the threat of the swart gevaar was used to excuse any and all kinds of violence. In the pernicious narrative of âus' against âthem', these dangerous strangers, these âintruders' in the land of their own birth, had to be obliterated. In that unyielding construct of threat and danger, of your death or mine, there is no middle ground, no compromise and no space for thought or language.
If Pistorius was not shooting to kill the woman with whom he had just been sharing a bed, those four bullets fired indicate that there is still no middle ground. Because whoever Pistorius thought was behind that door, firing at such close range meant that when he finished there would be a body on that bathroom floor.