One Tragic Night (20 page)

Others wanted to know why Oscar was going to the district surgeon and whether he was receiving some kind of special treatment by appearing in court so swiftly after his arrest.

‘Look, obviously when a person has been accused of a crime like murder they look at things like testing under the fingernails, taking a blood alcohol sample and other standard medical tests that are done,' Beukes said, insisting that there was no special treatment at all. ‘If a person requests to be brought to court, then it is possible. The person was arrested this morning, he was taken to the police station like any other person who is detained and arrested. We will be opposing bail; he will be bringing a bail application this afternoon and we will be opposing bail.'

Then, without skipping a beat, Beukes dropped another soundbite that would fuel speculation surrounding a potential motive. She was asked whether or not eyewitnesses had been interviewed.

‘There are witnesses that have been interviewed,' she confirmed. ‘We're talking about neighbours that had heard things earlier in the evening and when the shooting took place. I can confirm that there has previously been incidents at the home of Oscar Pistorius. I'm not going to elaborate on that, just that there
have been previous incidents … of allegations of a domestic nature.'

Could this illustrate a pattern of domestic altercations?

Beukes closed the impromptu briefing at the entrance to the Silver Woods estate by confirming that there were no signs of forced entry on the property and reiterating her earlier statement that initial media reports did not emanate from the police.

‘The SAPS were just as surprised to hear over the radio that the allegations had been made that the deceased had been perceived to be a burglar. We were very surprised, and those allegations did not come from us,' she said.

Around 5 kilometres away, at the Boschkop police station, Oscar was just arriving. The police station is located amongst smallholdings in the far east of Pretoria. Except for the luxury estates close to the city, it serves mostly the semi-rural areas stretching to the border with Bronkhorstspruit. It was nearing midday when, despite the scorching summer sun high in the sky, the athlete, dressed in grey tracksuit pants and a grey hoodie, was escorted into the building amidst an entourage of police, family members and lawyers. Photographers were already waiting. Oscar's brother Carl covered Oscar's head with a tracksuit, shielding his face from the snapping lenses while their sister Aimee trailed behind. Within an hour, the paperwork had been filed and Oscar was moved to the Mamelodi Day Clinic where the district surgeon on duty would be responsible for drawing blood and taking urine samples. He would also make observations about the accused's physical appearance and carry out any other tests required.

As glass vials filled with Oscar's blood in Mamelodi, journalists who had been briefed by the police at his house sped off to their next location in anticipation of a bail application. Oscar was scheduled to appear at 2pm but no one was quite sure where. The athlete's lawyers wanted to bring the bail application that afternoon but, at such short notice, it was unlikely they would find an opening on the roll at the Pretoria Magistrate's Court. It then emerged that his lawyers wanted to try the court at the Pretoria Central Prison. A magistrate was alerted and assigned, and the media started gathering.

But as the day went on, it was clear Oscar wouldn't have time to apply for bail. The courts stop operating at 4pm. While the media's speculation turned to the possibility of a last-minute urgent application in the North Gauteng High Court, Oscar's lawyers and family were preparing him for his first night in jail at the Boschkop police station.

We crowded around the flat-screen television in the newsroom, our necks craned to watch as Brigadier Denise Beukes's press conference was broadcast live. There was a sharp intake of breath and a chorus of exclamations as the policewoman disregarded reports that had been running all morning about the shooting being a mere accident. When she revealed that there had been previous incidents at Oscar's house of a domestic nature, we knew that the story had completely flipped.

I hammered on my keyboard as Beukes continued to speak, live-tweeting her statement to a public desperate for any new information about the incident. Details were, as we say in the industry, ‘sketchy', and there had been little to no official confirmation of anything. For nearly three hours, there was only speculation and presumption feeding the media machine.

At first, I didn't quite comprehend the magnitude of the story we were dealing with but within minutes of the news breaking, it reverberated around the world. It took less than five minutes for my cellphone to ring – a major international news network looking for an interview, quickly.

Amidst the confusion and the chaos of an unfolding story, I raced into my Sandton office and began working the phones, managing the story from there while Barry was on the scene in Pretoria.

One of the initial major journalistic hurdles was to confirm the identity of the victim and to ensure that her relatives and friends had been informed before announcing her name on air. We knew that Oscar had been photographed with
the glamorous, striking blonde reality television star Reeva Steenkamp over the previous weeks and their pictures had been published in the entertainment pages. The hashtag
#ReevaSteenkamp
was also trending on Twitter but we needed on-the-record confirmation.

A colleague gave me a number for Reeva's modelling agent, Sarit Tomlinson, and I immediately called her. When Sarit answered I could tell straight away that she was in pieces. Her job is to publicise the fabulous, not deal with this kind of crisis management on an incomprehensible global scale. Sarit had Reeva's parents on the other line and just didn't know what to tell them. She agreed on a brief, generic comment: ‘Reeva's parents are in Port Elizabeth; we are all in shock and are in communication with people on the scene but we need to wait for official statements.'

A close friend of June Steenkamp, Samantha Sutton, also spoke about what was unfolding in Port Elizabeth: ‘The parents are both in a bad way. We got medication from the family doctor to calm them down and are giving them tea. Her mother keeps saying “Reeva can't be dead” and she doesn't believe she is gone.'

As the morning passed, the story exploded and the full extent of the implications began to set in. Every radio station, TV network, news website and blog across the world wanted to speak to someone in South Africa and our newsroom phones lit up. Together with my colleagues, we did dozens of crossings. As we hung up, we would lift the handset again to do another. And as the news gathered momentum, we watched Oscar's fame, reputation and career unravel.

On Rivonia Road, the busiest street in Sandton, workmen in blue overalls and luminous yellow safety straps climbed a ladder to the summit of a billboard and began to pull down a massive poster bearing Oscar's face and the words ‘Every Night is Oscar Night'. Television network M-Net had withdrawn its entire Academy Awards live coverage campaign featuring the athlete ‘out of respect and sympathy to the bereaved'. The massive poster drooped down, Oscar's smiling face dangling upside down as it fell from grace. The image spoke volumes.

On Oscar's official website, the banner featured the sprinter in green-and–black racing gear exploding out of his starting blocks with the strapline ‘I am the bullet in the chamber'. After some time and prodding from the public, the unfortunately timed banner was removed.

At the same time, there were intense deliberations about whether or not the
reality series
Tropika Island of Treasure
, featuring Reeva, should continue premiering in a few days as planned. Samantha Moon, the executive producer and creator, confirmed that they had decided to go ahead with airing the show. She commented:

Meanwhile, we waited for clarity on whether there would be a formal bail application in the afternoon. That night South African president Jacob Zuma delivered his annual state of the nation address in parliament. I cast my mind back to the previous year when Zuma had praised Oscar in his address. ‘Our star performer, Oscar Pistorius, has set the standard for the year by winning the 2012 Laureus Award. Congratulations,' Zuma proudly boasted to the country. This year the Paralympian's shadow hung over the event like a cloud.

After my final live TV crossing for the night from the windy rooftop of a building in central Johannesburg, I took a moment to digest the unfathomable, surreal events of the day.

While I had fielded calls from radio and TV stations in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Spain, the Czech Republic and other more remote countries, facts were regurgitated and so were the questions. They were mostly about Oscar.

At home, as South Africans, we struggled to come to terms with the news, not wanting to comprehend the truth of what might have occurred in Oscar's bathroom that night. We justified, contemplated hypotheses and drove speculation about why he would have shot and killed his girlfriend. The country had been rocked to its very core. Then, true to form, we began to joke. The reality was simply too much to bear. And in South Africa, reality is often stranger than fiction. South Africa repeatedly produces material that not even a best-selling crime writer could conceptualise. Perhaps that is why it is so difficult for us to deal with reality. It just seems, well, too unreal.

Oscar had brought us such pride on the world's stage and now the veneer had been stripped off, the gloss was horribly tarnished.