One Tragic Night (65 page)
Authors: Mandy Wiener
Nel told Taylor that Oscar would claim that on the morning of the shooting he was anxious, and that he has had it tested that when he is in such a state his screams sound like those of a woman. âThat is not true. He sounds like a man,' Taylor responded.
Nel was trying to establish a pattern of behaviour as observed by someone who had prior, intimate knowledge of the accused.
Crucially, under cross-examination, Taylor was forced to make a telling concession about the screaming she had heard from Oscar:
| Roux: | So when you heard him screaming, it was out of anger but not in situations where he perceived his life to be threatened? |
| Taylor: | No, M'Lady. |
| Roux: | Is that a fair statement that I make to you when you said: âno' ⦠[intervenes] |
| Taylor: | Yes. |
| Roux: | I think I understand what you mean. It means that you have not heard him screaming when he perceived his life to be threatened. |
| Taylor: | No, M'Lady. |
Taylor recounted how on 30 September 2012 she had travelled to the Vaal River with Oscar and Darren Fresco to visit some friends. Justin Divaris and Samantha Greyvenstein had travelled in another car.
On the way home, with Fresco at the wheel, the car was stopped by police officials because they were speeding. Taylor recalled that the officer asked the men to step out of the car and Oscar left his gun on the seat:
So Oscar had left his gun on the seat of the car and when the police had a look, he saw the gun was on the seat and he said to Oscar that the gun could not just be left, just be left on the seat there. So the policeman cocked the gun and the bullets flew out of the, out of the gun into the car and then Oscar got very angry and eventually they gathered the bullets, they found all the bullets and they put the gun back together and we drove away.
Taylor elaborated on her ex-boyfriend's anger:
He shouted at the policeman because he said that he was not allowed to touch his gun. After we left there, Oscar and Darren were pretty anxious and a little bit irritated with the policeman and so they laughed and they said that they wanted to shoot a robot [traffic light] and then Oscar shot a bullet out the sunroof.
She told the court that while she was sitting in the back seat, she saw Oscar take his gun and shoot out of the car. She heard âa very, very loud sound' and both men then laughed.
She claimed that they didn't talk about the incident and carried on driving. They went to sign papers at the home of a friend of Oscar, but she couldn't recall where. Then they went to dinner in Sandton.
The pressure of being in the witness box under the world's gaze was at times too much for Taylor to bear. On two occasions, when asked how she felt about how her relationship with Oscar ended and his infidelity, she burst into tears, prompting the court to be stopped. Taylor was a shaky witness, lacking in confidence. Inevitably, her testimony was met with public scepticism and an assumption that she was a woman scorned, and hell hath no fury like one.
Roux's line of questioning suggested that the defence team believed her evidence was seated in a desire to get back at Oscar. Under cross-examination, Taylor conceded that after the couple's first break-up, she had a relationship with mining millionaire and TV producer Quinton van der Burgh while the athlete was at the London Olympics.
In her testimony in court, Taylor couldn't remember exactly where the sunroof shooting happened. She also couldn't say whether it was on a highway or
suburban road â just that it took place about 15 minutes after the police had stopped their vehicle for speeding. She also couldn't recall the location of the friend's house where Oscar had apparently signed firearm-related papers. And she couldn't remember the name of the Sandton restaurant the trio went to, only that it was a burger joint at Atholl Square. She further couldn't recall whether Oscar took her home or whether she slept at his house that night.
Taylor's only real recollection of the events was that they had been at the Vaal River with friends and at some point on the way home Oscar fired a shot. Was this enough?
Roux questioned Taylor about his client's emotions at the time of the alleged shooting incident â was he angry, irritated or laughing? Taylor said he displayed all three emotions at different stages: âSo after we left the cops, he was angry. Before he fired the shots, he was obviously irritated from being stopped. He then joked around to fire shots and after he fired the shots, he laughed about it.'
The advocate was dismantling Taylor's evidence, casting doubt over her recollection of events. There were simply too many discrepancies and too many details she couldn't remember.
Roux put it to her that Oscar would testify that the only time he ever signed firearm-related documents in her presence was in Pretoria, and not in Johannesburg as she had testified. He would also claim that he did not fire a shot through the sunroof of the car, as she had told the court. It would be a flat denial.
âI can clearly say that he shot through the [sun]roof of a car,' reiterated Taylor, but by this point Roux was done. This meant it would be Taylor's shaky recollection pitted against Oscar's blatant dismissal of the allegation. Only Darren Fresco could sway the court.
âAre you fucking mad?' Darren Fresco allegedly asked Oscar after he fired his gun through the sunroof of a speeding car. At least, that was the version Fresco presented to the court.
Fresco met Samantha Taylor through Oscar Pistorius while they were dating. The network engineer took the stand after Taylor and while he agreed with her that Oscar had fired a shot through the sunroof, there were many discrepancies in their versions.
Fresco recounted to the court how he was driving home from the Vaal with Oscar and Taylor in the car, when he was pulled over twice â first for not having number plates on the vehicle he was driving, and then several kilometres down
the road, for speeding. On both occasions, the officers issued him with fines. Fresco said the runner had his 9 mm pistol between his legs on the seat of the car, which ultimately led to the altercation with the officers on the second time they were stopped:
After the Grasmere toll plaza and just thereafter we had been pulled over by some Metro police for speeding. At this stage the policeman had come to my window and asked for my licence and asked me to please step out of the vehicle, which I had done. He was busy asking me questions and it was taking a bit longer and shortly, shortly after that the accused had come out of the vehicle to see what was taking so long.
He had come round to my side, the front right of the vehicle to see what was going on and shortly thereafter there was another Metro police person who had gone round to where the accused had been sitting and had picked up his gun off his seat. Then there was an altercation, a verbal altercation between the accused and the Metro police officer. The officer had picked up the accused's weapon off the passenger seat, to which the accused had replied: âYou cannot just touch another man's gun.'
Fresco explained that the officer had picked up the weapon and had âcleared' it, causing the bullet that was one-up in the chamber to be ejected into the vehicle.
| Nel: | So when the policeman cleared the firearm and ejected the one bullet, what happened? What did the accused do? |
| Fresco: | He started telling the officer: Now your fingerprints are all over my gun, so if something happens you are then going to be liable for anything that had happened. |
| Nel: | So now the bullet is ejected. What happened? |
| Fresco: | Then in the interim his licence, his firearm licence had been given to the Metro police officer to which he asked him a question: Mr Pretorius ⦠and he said: well, actually if you could read it, it would state Mr Pistorius. |
Fresco scrambled around the car searching for the bullet and eventually found it after moving the seat. He seemed to remember Oscar putting the bullet back into the magazine of the gun.
As a further indication of how fast Fresco had been driving, shortly after that incident, another set of metro police officers arrived on the scene, telling the
men they had been chasing them since the toll plaza. They were issued with a speeding fine and allowed to continue. Fresco says Oscar was furious that someone had touched his gun:
| Fresco: | I was driving, the accused was in the passenger seat. Sam Taylor was in the back of the car and then without prior warning he shot out the sunroof. Instinctively I had literally just moved over to the right-hand side of the vehicle. Once I had flinched over to the right-hand side of the vehicle, having ducked down, I had seen the weapon being brought back in, through the sunroof. |
| Nel: | Did you say anything? |
| Fresco: | Apologies for my language M'Lady, but I asked him if he is fucking mad. |
| Nel: | What did he say? |
| Fresco: | He just laughed, M'Lady. By that stage it literally felt as if my ear was bleeding. I had a constant ringing in my left ear. |
| Nel: | Did you enquire from him why? What was he doing, after the shot was fired? |
| Fresco: | He just laughed about what had just happened. |
| Nel: | Did you discuss this incident with him at all? |
| Fresco: | No, after that basically we just carried on driving. |
If true, it was remarkably reminiscent of the Tashas incident account: a gun discharged with reckless abandon and never a word spoken about it.
While Fresco had pointed out the location of the alleged incident to Investigating Officer Mike van Aardt, he conceded under cross-examination that they did have to drive up and down four times before finding the spot he remembered. There were pictures to prove it, marked with a little blue label in file HI. Fresco told the court the incident had occurred somewhere near Modderfontein, but Taylor could not pinpoint the location.
Like Taylor, Fresco remembered they had accompanied Oscar to a house to sort out some kind of administration related to a firearm. However, unlike Taylor, he could remember the restaurant they then went to: the Gourmet Garage at Atholl Square.
To undermine Fresco's credibility, Roux picked at fine details. The only things in common between Fresco and Taylor's testimony was that they were together with Oscar, returning from the Vaal River, when the athlete apparently fired a single shot out of the sunroof. The two witnesses did not corroborate
their location or the exact circumstances that led to the shot being fired.
Taylor had told the court that Fresco and Oscar had been angry after they were pulled over by the police and that they were then joking about shooting out traffic lights. Fresco denied this, insisting that he was angry and that it was the accused who had found the incident funny.
Fresco admitted he had received the fines and then crumpled them up and thrown them in the car. He couldn't answer what happened to the tickets subsequently, but assumed Justin Divaris had taken care of them as the car was from his dealership.
In his evidence-in-chief, Fresco had told the court that when returning from the Vaal, Oscar had his gun between his legs and that he had had no issue with Fresco's speed. He also claimed that when Oscar was driving the vehicle on the way to the river, Fresco had taken a photograph of the speedometer at 200 km/h.
