One Tragic Night (5 page)

As Johan Stipp navigated his Prado around the corner into Bush Willow Crescent, he took in the scene on the pavement outside the modern grey double-storey home. He had no idea who the house belonged to but had gathered that this must be where the screams and shots he and his wife had heard earlier had originated. It was also in this house that he believed he saw a man walking behind a lit bathroom window, from right to left.

There was a car parked in the street outside the house and he pulled up behind it. A man was leaning against a white BMW in the driveway. The man motioned him nearer and directed him towards the door. A woman was standing in the doorway.

‘I'm a doctor. Can I maybe be of assistance? Can I help?' Dr Stipp said to Johan and Carice.

Stander instantly suggested Stipp go in to see if he could help. As Stipp made his way inside, he stopped and turned back to Stander. He thought it important to clarify his status, just in case.

‘I'm actually a radiologist,' said Stipp, before walking through the door.

Back inside the house Carice explained to Oscar, ‘There's a gentleman, he's a doctor.' They were both relieved that someone with medical expertise had arrived.

Stipp saw a woman lying on her back at the bottom of the staircase. He also noticed a man he didn't recognise to her left, kneeling over her on the side closest to the kitchen. He had his left hand on her groin and the second and third fingers of his right hand inside her mouth. Stipp bent down next to the woman.

‘I shot her. I thought she was a burglar and I shot her,' was the first thing Oscar said to him as he knelt down.

Stipp's medical training kicked in. He tried to open the woman's airway and look for signs of life. She had no pulse in her neck. He checked her wrist but there was no peripheral pulse either. He was positioned on the side of her badly damaged, broken right arm. The woman showed no signs of breathing and she seemed to be clenching down on Oscar's fingers as he was trying to open her airway.

Stipp thought to try what is known in medical circles as a ‘jaw lift manoeuvre' in order to open her airway but he struggled because her jaw was still clenching down on Oscar's fingers.

He could find no signs of life at all. Stipp opened the woman's right eyelid and could immediately see that the pupil was fixed and dilated and that the cornea was milky. This was the telltale sign for him. It was already drying out so it was obvious that the woman was mortally wounded.

During Stipp's attempts to revive Reeva, Oscar was still praying and crying. He prayed to God please to let her live. She could not die. He vowed to dedicate his life and her life to God if she would only live and not die that night.

Now that the urgency had dissipated, Stipp took time to look over the woman's body and assess her injuries. He noticed the wound on her right thigh and hip and another on her right upper arm. As he searched further, he noticed the blood in her hair and what appeared to be brain tissue around the right area of her skull. It was obvious to him that there was nothing left for him to do for her.

Mike Nhlengethwa had dressed and walked over to see what the commotion was about at his neighbour's home, leaving his wife Rontle in bed. In the street he identified the security vehicle he had watched driving away from the Stipps' house and he could hear crying coming from inside Oscar's home.

He recognised Johan Stander standing in the driveway, greeted him and asked, ‘Johan, is Oscar okay?'

‘Hey, Oscar's okay, but I think it is better you go and check yourself inside,' was the best response Stander could muster.

Mike walked towards the front door. Inside he could see Oscar kneeling next to a woman who was covered in blood. Oscar was crying and there was another man with him. Oscar was pleading with the man to help him, repeating, ‘Please, please help.'

Mike couldn't handle the scene playing out before him and retreated to the door where Stander was still trying to get hold of emergency services.

Stipp stood up and walked outside, leaving Oscar kneeling on the floor next to his girlfriend's body. ‘Ja, it's very bad,' said Stipp to Carice. He then reached for his own phone and called the trauma unit at Wilgers Hospital. They instructed him to phone private ambulance service Netcare and he gave the number to Stander.

At 3:27:06 Stander dialled 082 911. Stipp took the phone and spoke to the dispatcher, describing the injuries. At one point, Carice took the phone and attempted to give the dispatcher directions to the scene.

In the meantime the security guard, Baba, had made several calls of his own. He had alerted the police at the Boschkop police station and had contacted the control room of his security company. He had also tried to get hold of an ambulance.

It took less than 20 minutes for the emergency services to arrive at Silver Woods estate. Oscar and Carice stayed at Reeva's side during the agonising wait, while Stipp periodically went inside to check on her status. Her condition did not change.

Stander, who had not heard any of the shots or the screams and had simply responded to Oscar's distressed early-morning call, asked Stipp what had happened. Had he heard anything? Stipp explained he had heard four shots, silence, screams and then another four shots. And while he had initially been baffled as to what had led to the screams and the shots, he now had a better understanding, having witnessed the scene first-hand. He also knew there was nothing more he could do to help the woman lying inside the house.

When the Netcare ambulance finally pulled up, Carice dashed outside to the pavement, shouting, ‘Just come quick, just come quick!' The emergency workers offloaded a stretcher but they struggled to get it through the doors to the house.

Once inside, the paramedics rushed to assess the patient. They lifted her black vest and placed white ECG electrode pads on her chest to check for any signs of life.

Oscar was in a state. He kept asking the paramedics to do whatever they could
to save Reeva's life. ‘Let's just step aside so that they can work on her,' Carice said to Oscar and the two retreated to the kitchen nearby. Emergency officials followed them into the kitchen to make sure Oscar was all right and to check whether they could phone anyone for him.

At the foot of the staircase, the frenzy had calmed. It had soon become apparent to the paramedics, as it had been to Dr Stipp, that there was nothing more they could do.

The paramedics asked for Reeva's ID and Carice explained to Oscar they needed Reeva's handbag so they could get her driver's licence or ID book. Oscar said it was upstairs and went off to fetch it while Carice remained downstairs with the medics.

From the doorway, Stipp realised what was playing out and turned to Stander. ‘Do you know where the gun is?' he asked. It was obvious to him that Oscar was overwrought and he was concerned that the athlete might hurt himself. Stander had no idea where the firearm was. He went inside and asked his daughter, ‘Where's Oscar going?'

Carice noticed that Oscar had disappeared and then she too clicked. She remembered him telling the paramedics that the gun was upstairs in the bathroom. She too thought he might shoot himself. Carice looked at her father, leapt up and raced up the stairs, calling Oscar's name. She stood at the top of the stairs, which was still in darkness, shouting, ‘Oscar, please just bring the bag quickly!'

She could hear him walking across the tiled lounge and then his footsteps fell silent as he stepped onto the carpet in the bedroom.

‘Oscar, please just bring the bag,' she panicked, fearing the worst.

Moments later, he came back out, handed her the bag and walked down the stairs.

Reeva Steenkamp was declared dead at 3:50am.

‘Please, Oscar, just let me know who I can phone for you. Somebody needs to come,' Carice urged her neighbour and friend. She could see he was fumbling with his phone. They were standing in the kitchen area and his attempts to make phone calls were punctuated by bouts of vomiting.

Finally, however, Oscar managed to dial his friend Justin Divaris, but seemed to be making no sense. Carice took the handset from him and explained to Justin what had happened. The same thing happened with his call to Peet van Zyl, his agent. Oscar then called his brother, Carl.

Mike Nhlengethwa waited for the paramedics to leave before departing himself. He watched as the paramedics carried the stretcher back out and loaded it into the ambulance, empty. It was then that he knew the woman was ‘no more'.

When he got back home, all he could tell his wife was that he didn't know what had happened, but somebody had died.

Johan Stipp hung around for a while, exchanged numbers with Stander and then drove home. He walked back into his bedroom at around 4:20am. Stipp told Annette that a man had killed his girlfriend. She asked him what the man looked like. He explained that he was very muscular and had tattoos on his back but he hadn't paid much attention because his primary concern was the woman. It was only later that day that Stipp worked out who the shooter was and the scale of what he had witnessed.

As he pulled up to the Boschkop police station at around 3:30am on Valentine's Day, Lieutenant-Colonel Schoombie van Rensburg was reflecting on what a busy night it had been for his officers.

He had spent the past few hours at the Mooikloof Ridge estate on Garsfontein Road in Pretoria East, around 15 kilometres from the Silver Woods estate and one of many similar upmarket security enclaves in the city, protecting the wealthy from the threat of industrious criminals. The Boschkop police station covers a large swathe east of the capital, much of which comprises such security estates.

The colonel had been on duty in Mooikloof with his team, investigating an armed robbery that had been reported. He had left the scene and driven back to the station to collect the medical registers because one of the suspects arrested in Mooikloof had been transported to hospital. Van Rensburg wanted to make an entry in the register and also check on the night shift at his station.

Perhaps it was fortuitous, perhaps rotten luck. But as the colonel walked into the Boschkop police station in the dead of the night, the telephone rang. It was a report of a shooting at the Silver Woods estate.

Van Rensburg had a problem, one that is all too characteristic of police stations in South Africa. He didn't have a car to send to the scene to follow up. One of his vehicles had transported the suspect arrested at Mooikloof to hospital while the other was still on the scene with other members of his team. Because his was the nearest motor vehicle to the scene, the responsibility fell on him to respond.

The station commander turned to a low-ranking constable in the charge office
and asked her to accompany him. Constable Christelle Prinsloo told her commander she knew the location of the address they had been given and the two jumped into Van Rensburg's car and raced out to Silver Woods. They pulled up to the address at 3:55am – five minutes after Reeva Steenkamp had been declared dead.

The first observation the colonel made was that there was an ambulance parked outside with its rear doors open. He also noted a dark-coloured Mini Cooper and a white BMW as well as the security checkpoint the estate guards had set up, controlling access to the house.

Van Rensburg made his way through the checkpoint and into the house where, at the bottom of the flight of stairs, he saw a body covered in towels. As the police officers entered the foyer, a female paramedic approached them to inform them that the woman was dead on arrival. Together they removed the towels and the black bags that had been tied to the woman in haste, desperation and in vain. The paramedic pointed out the wounds to the head, the right side of the victim's hip and to her right arm, above the elbow, as well as to the left hand.

Once he had finished inspecting the corpse, Van Rensburg's next task was to establish the course of events that had led to the shooting. For this he needed to speak to the shooter and examine the scene.

He made his way further into the house, towards the kitchen, where Oscar was standing with Carice. A veteran police officer, Van Rensburg would have observed the pops of colour and evidence surrounding him as he took stock of the situation: the rectangular gift wrapped in striped red, silver and white paper; the pink heart-shaped sweets in clear cellophane resting atop the present; the white envelope addressed to ‘Ozzy', underlined by a swirly line and two hearts; the dark-wood and chocolate-brown leather photo frames; an image of a man on a superbike; all would have stood out. So too would the orange and metallicgrey miniature Lamborghinis on the granite kitchen counter and a 9 mm Luger bullet, standing upright like a soldier on the roof of one of the toy cars.