Reeva: A Mother's Story (22 page)

It was painful re-living the scenario yet again as Nel insisted Oscar knowingly fired at Reeva. She was facing the door when he fired directly at her. He said WhatsApp messages between the pair showed the state of the relationship – they were having problems – and they showed Reeva was scared of him. A witness heard an argument; another saw the bathroom light on. Her stomach contents indicated she was awake and eating hours after he claimed they had gone to sleep. ‘Nobody went to bed in that house,’ he said. ‘Nobody was sleeping.’ He concluded by arguing that the three other charges revealed a pattern of behaviour in which the accused acts recklessly and does not take responsibility for his actions.

It was a very intense day, but the next day was worse, unspeakably worse. Even though I watched the proceedings with Tania on a screen in another room rather than remaining in court, it was very discomfiting to sit through the arguments formulated to ‘save’ the accused. Barry Roux said the trial should have begun with a charge of culpable homicide rather than murder, but insisted that Oscar in any case should be acquitted. His argument was that if the firing of the gun was purely reflexive, he lacked criminal capacity. If there was a thought process, it was ‘putative private defence’ (self-defence) because he believed he was in danger – he believed an intruder was coming out of the toilet. He had no motive to kill Reeva.

Harsh intakes of breath were heard when Barry Roux compared Oscar’s years of disability to an abused woman who kills her husband after many assaults. Was he playing to Judge Masipa’s well-known antipathy to men who abuse their partners? It was a strange comparison to make, but he used it to maintain that the shooting was a reflexive action after a ‘slow burn’ of vulnerabilities led to a point at which he had ‘had enough’. He was anxious and acting on ‘primal instinct’.

Roux then presented the judge with a timeline to counter the state’s version of events – particularly that the fatal shots were fired at 3.17 a.m., not 3.12 a.m. He said noises heard at 3.17 a.m. were the thuds of the cricket bat as Pistorius broke down the toilet door. He states that the shots were earlier, and that the screams heard before 3.17 a.m. came from Oscar, not Reeva, who he argued was already fatally wounded. He also said it was ‘fatal for the state’ that a security guard went past the house at 2.20 a.m. and heard no arguing.

It was horrible to hear the defence pull to bits the version of events we believed to be true. He dismissed the neighbours’ accounts, alleging contradictions in several testimonies regarding the number of screams and gunshots heard. He also produced photographs that showed an officer touching items in the bedroom to allege that police had disturbed the scene. He ended, surprisingly, by saying his client should be found guilty of a separate charge of negligently discharging a firearm in a restaurant, but insisted he did not deliberately pull the trigger. He ‘made a mistake’.

And with that, we were back to Port Elizabeth again for almost five weeks as Judge Thokozile Masipa was expected to deliver a verdict on 11 September.

19 August 2014
 

I woke up with a heavy heart. Reeva would have been thirty-one today. We would have been phoning her, talking to her about her plans to celebrate. Perhaps she would even have been with us, visiting Port Elizabeth. She was twenty-nine when she died. We have missed celebrating her thirtieth birthday and she wasn’t here to mark Barry’s seventieth in 2013 – two milestones which should have been happy family occasions. Life goes on, but with such emptiness.

On this August day, we decided to go early down to the beach in Summerstrand, to the exact spot where we had scattered her ashes and released doves and had the minister pray for her soul in the presence of the family and precious friends. So we went, Barry and I alone. We took beautiful pink roses and we waded into the water and sent them out to the sea for her and the dolphins. We said Happy Birthday and felt very sad, missing her lots and lots. It seems to get worse, not better. How are we supposed to live happily without her? It’s too much really. It’s like a constant pain in the chest. We miss her so much. She was such a wonderful person, kind and loving and always devoted to us. It’s hard to live without her. Time is not the healer people promise. Each day that passes just extends the time since we last saw her or heard her on the phone or wondered how she was. The passing of time makes us miss her more. She was so
full of life
.

We remained lost in our thoughts on the beach. It was about 10 a.m. and Wayne, her first love, arrived on the beach to wish her Happy Birthday too. He had brought a bottle of champagne and carried an assortment of flowers. We greeted him warmly. He’s like an adopted son to us, you know. After sending his flowers out to sea for her, too, Wayne poured Barry and himself a glass of champagne and poured the rest into the sea for Reeva.

Happy birthday my dearest, darling daughter.

The Verdict

Thursday 11 September 2014. The date loomed as the culmination of everything. We could hardly believe that our nightmare had begun 574 days ago – and we were still looking for answers as to what happened to our beautiful daughter on Valentine’s Day 2013. Today was the day we expected to get them. We needed the truth. We wanted justice for Reeva. Was that too much to ask?

Judge Masipa’s verdict was predicted to be long and detailed and delivered over two days. The judge is known for being thorough and she had to sift through evidence and testimonies from thirty-seven witnesses who gave evidence for the state and for the defence. She would have to give reasons why the court had accepted their evidence or not, and whether or not the burden of truth had been discharged by the state, ‘on whom the onus rested’. We were to hear that phrase a lot over the next two days. It became quite ominous. As South Africa does not have trials by jury, the verdict was that of the judge and the two assessors. It wasn’t clear at what point on Thursday or Friday she would announce her verdict on Count 1, the only charge we were interested in. We could only sit and wait.

As a family, we had been very tense leading up to this reconvening of the court. None of us could say we were in a good place. For me, it wasn’t just the gnawing emotional heaviness and the fidgety feeling of anticipation. Physically, I felt terrible too. I’m not a heavy drinker, but I had decided to give up my evening glass of wine for a month because I wanted to be clear-headed and fully alert on the day we heard the verdict. I did not want to miss a nuance of the ruling. However, I felt awful throughout my abstinence – where was that bounce and energy I’d expected from a detox? – but I’d made a pact with God not to have even a sip until 11 September, and I’d been holding out. In addition, Barry and I had mixed feelings and expectations about reaching this stage. We’d been warned that the period after a trial, no matter what the outcome, is the worst phase of bereavement for the family of a victim of crime. We had suspended our grief in order to channel our focus into seeing justice done for Reeva in the court, and then… what? It would be time to come home, sit back and work through our grief, and face up to the reality that she was never coming back. We would have to try to start life afresh again. How on earth we would do that we couldn’t imagine.

Spelling out a finality, the delivery of the verdict was another grim reminder that we had lost Reeva for ever; it was another prompt to trigger a tidal wave of grief. But there was comfort in numbers as we set off from the guest house in two vehicles – Barry, Jennifer, Dup, Truia, Tania, Michael, Lyn, Kim, Dion and I – braced to walk through the media frenzy. I had never seen so many camera crews, reporters and photographers in my life. They weren’t just thronging the pavements and crowding the walkway as usual. This time photographers were perched on boxes and step ladders to claim a better vantage point; reporters talked live to cameras announcing our arrival as we approached. Walking through that circus was a bombardment of flashing lights, clicking noises and murmuring voices. This was, after all, the day the world expected to hear the verdict in South Africa’s ‘Trial of the Century’. I didn’t have any tactics for dealing with this attention. You just have to look where you’re going. ‘How are you today, June?’ ‘June, how are you feeling?’ I understood everyone wanted to know my opinion. I was so close to the story they somehow thought I exuded some clues about what was going to happen.

Once inside and through security – the irony of being frisked for a firearm was never lost on me – we filed in to our horribly familiar bench in the empty courtroom. A pretty third-year law student presented me with a bouquet of red roses tied with a pink ribbon – a lovely gesture. Eleven roses to mark the date, she said. ‘Oscar is always getting letters, balloons and teddy bears,’ she said. ‘And this is all about Reeva.’

Returning yet again to courtroom GD was like a re-run of the start of the trial and of the opening of the Heads of Arguments. The Myers family arrived – the two sisters Gina and Kim and their mother forming a row of raven-haired women in the row behind us. They were followed by Reeva’s friends Darren Fresco and his wife Beatrix, and Kristin Ellis looking elegant in glasses and a black dress. The Pistorius family filled up their side of our shared front bench: Uncle Arnold and his wife Lois, Oscar’s father Henke, his sister Aimee, various cousins. We waited in a strange atmosphere of tension cut by the chatty sounds of the regular attendees greeting each other. Through a tragic incident we’ve had familiarity forced on us – the friends and family of Reeva and Oscar, the respective legal teams, the international press correspondents and public gallery supporters. We’re all linked for life by this legal process.

Carl Pistorius, Oscar’s older brother, was wheeled up to the front of the court in his wheelchair, still recovering from the serious injuries he had suffered in a high-speed head-on car smash on 1 August. His family must have been suffering with him in intensive care on top of Oscar’s plight. Even while they’d attended Closing Arguments, Carl was in ICU being treated for multiple fractures and internal lacerations to vital organs. And this was six years after he had been involved in a road accident where a female motorcyclist died after colliding with his vehicle; he was later acquitted for culpable homicide for the woman’s death. On the dot of nine o’clock Oscar walked in, nodded to us, and marched over to greet Carl who was in a smart grey suit with both legs fully extended in front of him in bulky white plastic medical boots. Barry Roux wrapped Oscar in a hug, and the court awaited.

‘This is awesome,’ I heard someone say. ‘This is history in the making. This is HUGE.’

Shortly before 9.30 a.m., the judge’s registrar, accompanied by two heavily armed tactical task team members, entered the court and placed the written judgement on the bench. The armed security officers positioned themselves on either side of the bench. Hush descended as we were called to be upstanding for the judge. At 9.34 a.m., she arrived, a small and weary figure in her red gown, limping up the few steps to her bench. We all did the bowing business, and then without delay she picked up the papers that lay on the desk in front of her: the papers that contained the verdict known only to herself and her two assessors. The 73-page ruling had been typed up in secret and kept under lock and key until this moment…

Deep breaths all around. A few nervous coughs. The shuffling of paper. Muttered prayers along the Pistorius bench.

Judge Masipa began by setting out an overview of the case, talking us through the layout of the crime scene and the circumstances under which the couple were there together. She spoke very softly in a calm, measured tone. Everyone in court leant forward and strained to catch her all-important words. Initially they amounted to a distillation of the basic facts. She went through the charges and the accused’s not guilty pleas to Counts 1, 2, 3 and 4. To me, it was a cloud of legalese: provisions, sections, schedules, acts, contraventions, alternative counts and so on, and I patiently waited for the first comment that would indicate where she was heading with her judgement. She named the members of the defence and prosecution teams, and repeated the accused’s ‘explanation of plea’ that Count 1 was a tragic incident after he mistakenly believed intruders had entered his house. Here, it struck me freshly again, how unbelievable Oscar’s story was – I mean, how can he have talked to Reeva in bed beside him as he got out of bed to move the fans as he described, and then not renew a conversation when he then immediately thought he heard intruders in the bathroom and bent down to get his gun from under the bed and walk towards the bathroom? It just didn’t make sense.

Meanwhile, the judge had continued reading from her papers, stating that the accused gave no explanation for Counts 2, 3 and 4. She summarised the prosecution case and went on to note witnesses who heard ‘a woman engaged in an argument’, ‘screams interpreted as a woman in distress’ and ‘sounds of gunshots and a man shouting for help’. At last, we were moving towards the crux of the matter.

But still Judge Masipa was setting out the foundations of the case. She moved on to the ‘common cause facts’, i.e. those that are not disputed by either side: that on 14 February 2013, shortly after three in the morning, screams were heard from the accused’s house; that the accused, while on his stumps, fired four shots at the toilet door; that at the time the shots were fired the deceased was inside the toilet; that the door of the toilet was locked from the inside; that the door of the toilet opened to the outside, that is into the bathroom; that three of the four shots struck the deceased; that the deceased sustained a wound on the right thigh, a wound on the left upper arm, a head injury and a wound on the web of the fingers and that the deceased died from multiple gunshot wounds. She added further ‘common cause’ facts: that soon after the shots had been fired the accused called for help; that he used a cricket bat to break down the door; that he removed the deceased from the toilet to the hallway downstairs; that he was very emotional soon after the incident and that he was seen trying to resuscitate the deceased. She concluded that the issues were limited to whether at the time the accused shot and killed ‘the deceased’ he had the requisite intention, and if so, whether there was any premeditation.