Reeva: A Mother's Story (18 page)

Gerrie Nel, a state prosecutor and advocate for the National Prosecuting Authority known as ‘the pitbull prosecutor’, was the leading the state’s case. He was our man. I found him very charismatic when we’d met in Dup’s chambers. Gerrie came to Port Elizabeth with the investigating officer, Captain Mike van Aardt – who had already been to see Barry and I at home to say that he’d taken the case and reassure us that he was going to pursue it as if it were his own daughter. They told us they’d interviewed 107 witnesses and not one had a bad word to say about Reeva. Lawyer friends told us Gerrie had more than thirty years’ experience and often took on high-profile cases, prosecuting with flair, dedication and determination. In contrast to Gerrie, who is paid a state salary, the defence team was rumoured to be costing Oscar Pistorius R100,000 per day; they were led by Barry Roux SC, a senior advocate of the Johannesburg Bar renowned for his skill in cross-examination and his ability to unsettle witnesses.

To take up our seats that rainy and depressing Monday, 382 days after we lost Reeva, Simone, Jennifer and I had flown up the previous evening from Port Elizabeth with Dup and his wife Truia. We’d settled in at the guest house and rallied ourselves for Day 1 of the trial. I had asked for a wake-up call at 5 a.m. – not that I would sleep well anyway – and tried to force down some breakfast and get ready for the twenty-minute drive to the High Court. I kept my emotions in check by concentrating on trivial things like what to wear. Respectful for court, I dressed in a black blazer, trousers, a white top and Reeva’s pearl necklace; Simone and Jennifer also wore sombre black. We had to park quite a way from the High Court building and walk down the pavement with the full glare of the world’s media pressing in on us. I held on to Dup’s arm as he tried to keep an umbrella stable above our heads. A short walk has never seemed so long with all the cameras clicking, TV equipment whirring and reporters announcing our arrival live into microphones as we approached.

Dup led us to courtroom GD, one of four courtrooms on the ground floor which open out from a dimly lit, low-ceilinged corridor. We were among the first to arrive in the square red-brick interior. I took in the recessed white-tile roof, fluorescent lighting and grey carpet-tiled floor that would become a horribly familiar environment over the coming months, and noted how the judge’s raised dais faced rows of long wooden benches like pews in a church. We filed in to the front bench allocated for VIPs, the Steenkamp family and friends. Kim and Dion arrived to support us. Reeva’s friend Gina Myers and her parents, Cecil and Desi, came too. Along the other half of the bench sat the Pistorius family, Oscar’s uncle Arnold and aunt Lois, his aunt Sonia Grobler, his brother Carl and sister Aimee.

I was steeling myself for the moment I would see Oscar for myself for the first time in person; I wanted to look him in the eye. I’d played through this scenario in my mind a hundred times over, but without an ending. How would I feel?

Oscar arrived, dressed in a dark suit, white shirt and black tie, and walked straight past us, looking resolutely ahead. I was disappointed. I wanted to see him and I wanted him to see me, but he didn’t acknowledge me. The whole point was that he must see that I was there. I’m Reeva’s mother and, you know, what he did to her was terrible. I wanted him to see that I was there representing Reeva.

The trial was scheduled to start at half past nine. It got to ten o’clock, then half past ten, eleven o’clock, half past eleven, and nothing had happened. Imagine the restlessness. Everyone was walking up and down. Word came through that the court staff were looking for an Afrikaans interpreter. In South Africa, the court uses English and interpreters are called for witnesses who speak Xhosa or Afrikaans. The interpreter they had been waiting for was still occupied in an upstairs courtroom. They’d requested another at short notice from Johannesburg, and she would have to drive to Pretoria, which on a good run takes about forty minutes. Two hours in and there was no official signal that proceedings were about to begin. A whisper went around that the courtroom staff had lost the key for the door through which Judge Masipa and her assessors enter the courtroom from her chambers. They couldn’t come into court because they were locked out! Jennifer whispered to me, ‘They’ve lost the key.’ I didn’t believe her at first. People were saying, ‘Shall we phone Houdini?’ You couldn’t have made it up. Eventually the call came to be upstanding as the judge climbed the steps to her black swivel chair on the bench and we bowed to her and sat down, waiting expectantly. Everything went wrong. The interpreter arrived, but broke down in tears, overwhelmed by the case, and had to leave the court. After all that! It was tempting to laugh – to relieve the tension – but we couldn’t laugh in court. Good gracious.

And then we were under way. The first shock came when Judge Masipa addressed ‘the accused’ and asked, ‘Mr Pistorius, how do you plead on premeditated murder?’

Not guilty
.

How did he plead on the other three counts?
Not Guilty.
Not Guilty.
Not Guilty
.

I was so shocked that he was actually standing there saying
Not Guilty
to every single charge. How could he say that when Reeva is dead and he shot her? Then I realised he was saying he was not guilty of the specific charge of premeditated murder – because he would be in jail for at least thirty years if he was found guilty of that – but I did expect him to take some responsibility, not deny
everything
so emphatically when there were so many close witnesses to two of the firearms charges. I couldn’t believe it. Then he accused the prosecution of attempting a character assassination, and denied that he and Reeva had been arguing.

The prosecution called the first witness. It was time to hear what other people had to say. First on the stand was a neighbour, the lady who had described hearing a woman’s ‘blood-curdling’ screams followed by four gunshots. Michelle Burger told the court: ‘The evening was extremely traumatic. The fear in that woman’s voice was difficult to explain.’ The information she had to impart was brief, but the court procedures meant she was in the stand a considerable time.

At the end of the day, I was numb. It was still raining as we left the court building and I was standing holding an umbrella at one of the bus stops outside the main entrance to the building when I saw the Pistorius family waiting to see Oscar safely through the sea of media. They came over to me. One of his aunts squeezed my arm and the other reached out and clasped my hand. Then Oscar’s older brother, Carl, came up and hugged me. He held his cheek against mine without saying a word. I didn’t mind that. You’ve got to feel for them too. They were in as much pain as I am, especially the little sister Aimee. Reeva was her friend, you know. She said to me, Reeva was always at their house and they had such fun. I felt sorry for the family. I have no hate in my heart. Not one of them pulled the trigger, yet everyone close to Oscar was going through a traumatic time.

So it was over. We had attended the first day of
The State vs Oscar Pistorius
as Dup had suggested and then he said I must go home, kindly reminding me that I didn’t have to put myself through that every day.

Back at home in Port Elizabeth, I watched every minute of the next few days of the trial on television. I saw Michelle Burger break down in tears and insist she was being as honest as she could be when the defence questioned her credibility. She sounded haunted by what she’d heard, saying every time she showered now she remembers the terrifying screams she heard. The proceedings were briefly adjourned when the court was told a media outlet was broadcasting an image of Michelle Burger, despite her request not to have her image shown, and that made me value the selflessness of these people who had come forward to do their civic duty and tell what they had seen and heard. I learnt that Estelle van der Merwe, also a neighbour of Oscar’s, heard arguing for about an hour before the shooting noises. Often, the television cameras flitted back to focus on ‘the accused’ as he held his head in his hands and wiped away tears as a description of Reeva’s grievous injuries was read out.

The next day, sitting on our red sofa under a giant black-and-white photograph of Reeva circled by handwritten messages from her friends, I kept track of the testimonies of further witnesses: professional boxer Kevin Lerena told a hushed court how Oscar had asked a friend to take the blame for shooting a gun in a restaurant last year. Even through the TV screen I could sense the trauma that everyone involved in the case was suffering. Another witness, neighbour Charl Johnson, said he had received phone calls and a threat after his phone number was read out in court the previous day. He continued to give evidence, describing how he heard a woman’s cries and gunshots. In cross-examination, Barry Roux suggested Johnson and his wife, Michelle Burger, had colluded over their testimony, but they stuck to their story. They knew what they had heard. I could see now how it was going to go – like a seesaw. Nel, then Roux. Nel, then Roux. The dynamic is up and down as each side compete to claim the most persuasive argument. One line of questioning seeks to dig out the truth we want; the other is negative for us. For a victim’s family, the adversarial nature of the criminal justice system is tough on the emotions. Watching the toing and froing made me want to transplant myself back into courtroom GD. It came to me that it was wrong to be back at home watching it on TV. This was all about seeing justice done for our daughter. I said to Barry, ‘I have to go back. I can’t sit here. I’m not in the right place. I have to be there for her.’

Dup was less than thrilled by my decision. As a senior counsel, he has worked on many murder cases and he knew exactly what I would have to go through. But I insisted. I intended to be there every day. While Jacqui Mofokeng and her ladies helped make arrangements for my return to Pretoria, emotions ran high in the courtroom on the fourth day. Johan Stipp, another neighbour of Oscar’s who is also a doctor, described what he saw. The first witness on the scene, he said he heard male and female voices ‘intermingled’, and said: ‘The first thing he [Oscar] said was, “I shot her. I thought she was a burglar. I shot her,”’ adding that Oscar was ‘very upset’. Dr Stipp disagreed with the defence’s theory that he heard a cricket bat hitting the bathroom door, rather than gunshots. He said he heard three gunshots, followed by a woman screaming, then two or three more gunshots. Barry Roux pounced on this saying it contradicted the forensic evidence.

I was back in court on the day Oscar greeted the ANCWL ladies as he entered. These were the ladies who sung in protest outside the High Court, recognisable in their long green shirts over black skirts or trousers. The look on their faces as he spoke to them was one of utter amazement. It was no easier facing the ordeal of coming into court on this second visit, but I had started to take pills to keep control. Your stomach gets tied in knots with stress so I took Immodium to calm it. You didn’t want to be sitting there, cramping, and having to rush out of court. I also took a mild 0.25mg tranquilliser to keep my mood steady because I could never anticipate what emotion each minute of testimony would prompt. Early on, the Silver Woods security guard Pieter Baba revealed Oscar called him and said through tears that everything was fine. Fine? How could everything be fine when my daughter was lying in his house lifeless?

Next up was Samantha Taylor, Oscar’s previous girlfriend, who got on the stand and said Oscar cheated on her with Reeva. She seemed so painfully young and she just blurted it out. She also witnessed his gun being waved around, testifying how he shot through the open sunroof of a car. The defence suggested Oscar was vulnerable and scared of being attacked, but Samantha Taylor said no, he always carried a gun without being overly anxious or concerned about his safety. She added that he also took his mobile phone to bed every night – which made me wonder again why, if we were to believe his story about an intruder, he didn’t just phone the police or security that night, instead of approaching his perceived ‘intruder’ with a gun. She also disagreed with the defence that her boyfriend’s screams could be mistaken for a woman and crucially, I felt, revealed there were one or two occasions when Oscar had thought he heard an intruder in the night and had woken her up.

A new week, and it began horribly. I have been so lucky to have the support of friends such as Dup and Jennifer as well as family. Reeva, I will always be haunted to know, died a terrible, painful death and pathologist Gert Saayman stepped forward to give his testimony of the autopsy. The details were so graphic the judge banned live broadcast and reporting of the testimony to preserve Reeva’s dignity, allowing only summary evidence to be reported later on. Professor Saayman explained that the bullets fired by Oscar ‘mushroomed’ on impact and were designed to cause maximum damage. He detailed each of the wounds Reeva suffered from these gunshots – to her hip and thigh, arm, head and fingers, and said she would have been immediately brain-damaged, and unconscious, but did not necessarily die straight away. He pinpointed the bullet holes in her Nike shorts and sleeveless black top. Throughout the testimony Oscar was audibly dry retching and vomiting, just feet from us. It wasn’t very nice. His fingers were in his ears so he couldn’t hear. It was a circus. The pathologist added an interesting fact: he said Reeva’s last meal was at 1 a.m., about two hours before she died, which contradicted Oscar’s story that they were both in bed from 10 p.m. The next day Professor Saayman stuck to his conclusion under cross-examination.

Darren Fresco was the next witness called – a good friend of Reeva’s and also of Oscar’s. It was at his engagement party that Oscar caused the scene that prompted one of Reeva’s long, anguished WhatsApp messages about how she was scared of him and the way he snapped at her. His wife Beatrix has had a huge tattoo spelling out REEVA on her back in memory of her. They loved her, you know. They came to her funeral. I’d met Darren before with Reeva for coffee, in a fun context. Now I was seeing all her friends again, but in stressful circumstances. Those four shots in the night have affected all these young peoples’ lives. Darren was phoning me all the time after her death, he was so upset, and I had to tell him I couldn’t speak to him; I didn’t know if he was still on friendly terms with Oscar or not. But he wasn’t. He had already given evidence against him on two of the firearm charges, testifying how Oscar had shot a gun out of the sunroof of a car and how on another occasion Oscar took his Glock 27 pistol, knowing it was ‘one-up’, i.e. had a bullet in it, and let off a shot before asking Darren to take the blame. It was brave of Darren to give evidence. He was promised indemnity from prosecution if his evidence proved reliable.