Reeva: A Mother's Story (24 page)

We sat down in the garden of the guest house and had a glass of wine – my first in a month, and which I had visualised drinking not with happiness but with a little more satisfaction than I did that hot afternoon of 11 September. We’d had a plan to go out discreetly later with the family to eat in the private room of a local restaurant, so Barry and I went upstairs to rest. But we couldn’t rest. Our phones were being bombarded with messages of shock and sympathy and disbelief and outrage from all over the world. I couldn’t help but switch on the television coverage. It was so upsetting, seeing these beautiful images of Reeva interspersed with footage of legal experts querying the judge’s application of law and of Oscar sobbing in relief in the dock. I couldn’t face eating dinner. My distress became uncontainable. I’d always said I’d hold it in until after the trial, and now my emotions were flooding out. I stayed in my room and hoped sleep would come to me. I wasn’t sure if I would be prepared to return to court the next day. I was angry.

The next morning dawned – always the worst time of day for me now – and we had to go back, but for what? I wasn’t sure until the last moment if I could climb into the car and set off again for the High Court. What a difference a day had made. Yesterday’s headlines – ‘Oscar’s Moment of Truth’ – had changed to ‘Oscar’s Great Escape’, ‘Tears of Relief’, ‘Athlete a very lucky man – lawyer’, ‘Not guilty of murder? Judge erred’ and ‘Appeal looms’. The car radio broadcast opinions of a multitude of legal experts. It was amazing how many legal experts had come out of the woodwork. Some stuck to their view that the state must appeal after a misapplication of law while others mused that if Judge Masipa ruled culpable homicide, a sentence would be at her discretion, and she could even impose a suspended sentence, a non-jail sentence or a fine. Feelings were running high. Someone showed me a tweet from a Johannesburg resident:

This case #OscarTrial has lost sight of the real Victim #Reeva Steenkamp, she has become the ‘intruder’ and #OscarPistorius the Victim. So sad.
 

So true.

Oscar arrived in court with a bodyguard, looking more relaxed than usual. Judge Masipa limped into court, flanked by armed bodyguards and a heavy police presence. Were they the same contingent as yesterday? Or did she have more protection because of her controversial judgement? She plunged straight into the three firearm charges. It all washed over me. It was more of the same tactical play from the defence. BBC Africa correspondent Andrew Harding tweets:
I have it on good authority that #Oscar Pistorius is only pleading not guilty because he says incident happened on different day.
He was referring to the discharge of a gun through the sun-roof. Well, I thought that Oscar wasn’t in court to tell the truth, just wriggle out of charges on technicalities and save his skin. It was a game. The judge muddled up Counts 2 and 3 and the courtroom collectively squirmed on squeaky benches and coughed as she paused for a long time to shuffle her papers. She proceeded to acquit him of one count of discharging a firearm in public, which prompted more muttering from observers. She found that the state had proved beyond reasonable doubt that he was guilty of another count of discharging a firearm in public. She found him not guilty of illegal possession of ammunition.

She was zooming through her ruling now, and we surely had to be getting close to the moment when she asked him to stand up and hear the court’s official verdict.

At 10.15 a.m. the nightmare replayed again in my head as she intoned the following:

‘In conclusion, I would like to recap on the four counts. In respect of Count 1, the allegation was that the accused and the deceased had an argument. That the deceased ran and locked herself in the toilet and that the accused followed her there, and fired shots at her through the locked door. Three shots struck her and she died as a result. Evidence led by the state in respect of this count was purely circumstantial. It was not strong circumstantial evidence. Moreover the evidence of various witnesses who gave evidence on what they heard, in what sequence and when, proved to be unreliable. The accused denied the allegations. Notwithstanding that he was an unimpressive witness, the accused gave a version which could reasonably possibly be true. In criminal law that is all that is required for an acquittal as the onus to prove the guilt of an accused, beyond reasonable doubt, rests with the state throughout.’

It was explained to me that as the onus rests with the state, an accused person does not have to be believed to be acquitted. Judge Masipa repeated how phone records supported Oscar’s story. She said he acted promptly to seek help after he shot Reeva. He prayed to God to save Reeva. He was distraught. She said ‘the accused cannot be found guilty of murder,
dolus directus
or
dolus eventualis
, on the basis of his belief and conduct. It cannot be said that he foresaw that either the deceased or anyone else for that matter might be killed when he fired the shots at the toilet door.’ She repeated her view that it cannot be said that he did not have a genuine belief that there was an intruder in the house. ‘Evidential material before this court show however that the accused acted negligently. The toilet cubicle was small with little room for manoeuvre.

‘Mr Pistorius, please stand up. Having regard to the totality of this evidence in this matter, the unanimous decision of this court is the following:

‘Count 1: Murder, read with Section 51(1) of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 105 of 1997, the accused is found not guilty and is discharged. Instead, he is found guilty of culpable homicide.’
 

We all knew it had been coming, but the impact of her words stunned the courtroom. All around me I heard gasps, sobbing, sniffs as people crumpled. It was unbelievable. The judge was still going over the other counts but none of us on the family bench were taking those in. Kim, next to me, was sobbing uncontrollably and I pulled her towards me for comfort. Her mother Lyn had her head on Kim’s other shoulder. We were all in pieces. My heart continued to beat but I didn’t feel alive. I was numb. I didn’t even think to look at him. I didn’t want to see him jubilant, though. I was happy for his family because they’ve been suffering like we have. They have to believe him, he’s family.

Yet another adjournment was announced. Truia and I went upstairs to a different room we had been allocated as a retreat along the prosecutors’ corridor and I decided not to return to that courtroom again. I didn’t want to know if he won extended bail, as his lawyers were now starting to appeal for. So much concern for him! This wasn’t about him in my eyes. It should have been about Reeva. I couldn’t take it a minute longer and I wasn’t going to pretend I could. From all over the world, people were phoning and texting me, everyone was very upset. The word travesty echoed in peoples’ comments. Donald Trump tweeted
No one has been more guilty of murder since OJ
.
Sharon Saincic, Chanelle Henning’s mother, said, ‘This is the wrong message. It shows if you have money in this country you will walk.’ Legal forums were abuzz with suggestions that the judge had made a mistake and she hadn’t rectified it. Justine Lang from BBC News tweeted:

One wonders if Judge Masipa has any idea of the rampaging legal storm over her decision to drop murder.
 

I never imagined I could feel more numb and bereft. During the forty-odd days of the trial, I had often sensed Reeva’s presence in the courtroom, but not today. I just felt emptiness. I found the way the judge referred to ‘the deceased’ so cold. I understood her role was that of an assessor of facts and evidence, but we, the victim’s family, hadn’t found any closure in the legal process. It was so wrong. How could they believe his story? If he was so paranoid about security, why was the broken window not fixed? Why was the alarm not fixed? Why was he happy to leave Reeva alone twice, for periods stretching over several nights, in the same house over Xmas and New Year?

As Reeva studied law herself, I wonder what she would make of the judgement, my wise and clever daughter. I imagine she would share the view of her great friend Kristin, her fellow law undergraduate, who sat two rows behind me during the verdict. Kristin had prepared herself for a finding of not guilty on premeditation, but she did not agree with the judge’s application of the law, particularly when it came to
dolus eventualis
. She was also dumbfounded by some of the conclusions drawn by Judge Masipa and how she outright dismissed a large portion of the state’s case. ‘I’m very disappointed,’ she said to me. ‘And scared that he will get off on a suspended sentence for culpable homicide.’

Back at the guest house, Barry and I sat down with family and friends and discussed how we felt. We were extremely disappointed with the verdict and our conversation went round and round over the same points and peculiar circumstances as if trying to purge ourselves of this horrible feeling of disbelief and shock. It was the worst of double whammies – to lose our daughter and then to see her violent death officially deemed an accident. It was never going to sit with us, this outcome, although we didn’t yet know what the sentence would be. To be honest I really didn’t care what would happen to Oscar because my daughter was never coming back. He was still living and breathing. She’d gone for ever. I just couldn’t get my head around this verdict. A court of law had believed his story and we had never believed his story. We wanted justice for Reeva and we hadn’t got it. Barry had said all along that whatever the verdict would be, whatever the sentence, ‘it will be what it will be and we must accept that and carry on with our lives’. That was going to be so difficult now when the conclusion to the trial had not matched what was in our hearts. The judge seemed to believe his version because it fitted in with the accepted timeline. Something had been missed. Only Oscar knew what happened.

I knew in my heart there was more to it. So many questions went unanswered. The clothes on the floor in Oscar’s house – my daughter would never have gone to bed leaving her clothes on the floor. And who said the bathroom light wasn’t working? When he went in to find her, the lights were on, weren’t they? If it was a burglar and he had a gun, which they all do, the burglar would be firing his gun, not hiding. ‘He’ was the intruder, the aggressor; domestic intruders come in with a purpose.

And Oscar was not a good witness, he was emotional. We had to halt the case all the way through for his dramas. I just didn’t believe him. I’m telling you, she was standing behind that door, pleading with him. They said the first shot would have been the most painful and she would have been suffering… I have to live with that thought and it’s terrible, terrible.

A lot of comments we received focused on the judge’s belief Oscar could not have ‘faked’ his distress so convincingly after the event and that he could not have stuck to the same story about the intruder so consistently. So many people disagreed. Such behaviour is characteristic of crimes of passion. He could have shot Reeva in a moment of rage, and subsequently been overcome with genuine remorse and emotion.

I didn’t want to hurt him. I didn’t want revenge. I didn’t want to see him go to prison for a long time, but I felt extremely unsettled by the court’s conclusion. That was very hard to swallow. Judges go by the law. They have to be careful about the person who is charged. She was very restricted in what she could do. She could only assess what she had in front of her and maybe she didn’t have enough evidence in front of her. Barry was right: from the very beginning we have never believed his story because all of this could have been prevented. If he thought that there was somebody in his bathroom, down the passage from his bedroom, his balcony windows were open, he could have shouted for help, he could have pressed an alarm, he could have used his phone to call security, he could have taken Reeva by the hand and shepherded her downstairs away from ‘the danger’. There were so many things that he could have done – that any reasonable person would have done – to prevent the catastrophe we have to live with.

The media expect me to feel hostility towards Oscar, but I have forgiven him in the Christian sense. I don’t want to carry poison in my body about that. You can make yourself ill. I don’t want him to suffer, that’s not in my heart. We have no feelings towards him, Barry and I, good or ill. We just want the truth and he is the only person who can fill in the missing blanks of what happened that night. He could have stood up and said, I’m sorry, something terrible happened and I killed her. NOT, I’m sorry, I made a mistake and I killed her. He shot four times through a door into a cramped space knowing what the effect of those kind of bullets would be and he must take full responsibility for that. We are talking about bullets that open explosively with barbs as they penetrate bone and tissue and which have since been withdrawn from sale by the manufacturer.

Barry feels slightly differently. Before he can totally forgive Oscar, he wants to sit down and talk. We’d both like to sit down in private and chat with him. I’m sure he’d like to talk to us as well. It hasn’t been appropriate until now, but it would get a lot off our chest. What would we say to him? I don’t know. I’m still holding everything inside. I just know that if you believe in God, you must forgive. You can’t look for someone to blame and carry that burden inside you because you’re also going to get sick. I’m not preaching, but for me and my religious beliefs, I have to forgive in order to survive even. Barry had a stroke from carrying that pain. You can’t let it destroy you.

The trial phase is over, but we don’t have closure. With this verdict, there is never going to be. How can there be? She’s not coming back. I was asked what an appropriate sentence would be, but I didn’t want to consider that. It won’t make my daughter come back. He has to live for the rest of his life with the knowledge of what he he’s done inside his heart. He was a man who had status, and now he has pity. He looks haunted. He may have won the court case, but he isn’t a winner long-term. He has to live with what he did for ever.