[For now, Mr. Pistorius,
26, is out on bail, living in his uncle’s house in Pretoria and awaiting his next court hearing on June 4. Family
members describe him as in mourning. Last week, his public relations company
announced that he was holding a private memorial for Ms. Steenkamp in his
uncle’s house, a move that was met with skepticism in the South African news
media.]
By Suzanne Daley and Lydia Polgreen
 |
Stimulii,
via Associated Press
Reeva
Steenkamp in a publicity photo for a reality show.
|
JOHANNESBURG —
The day before Reeva Steenkamp died, she was getting ready to give a speech on
a subject that she had known first hand and that is endemic in South Africa: violence
against women.
In the four months that
she had been dating the Paralympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius, she had
become a celebrity, and she had big plans for using her newfound fame to make a
difference. So she canceled a coffee date with her best friend, Gina Myers, to
keep working on her speech.
“She was so excited,”
said Ms. Myers, whose family had offered Ms. Steenkamp a room in their house
when her lease was up five months ago. “She called to say she wasn’t finished
yet. She had been in an abusive relationship” in the past “and she wanted
passionately to speak out about it,” Ms. Myers said. “She said that people
chose to be ignorant because the subject made them uncomfortable.”
But Ms. Steenkamp’s
ambition to do more than modeling ended on Feb. 14, when Mr. Pistorius shot her three times as she was locked in
a tiny bathroom off his bedroom. Now, this stunned country is debating whether
she died from the same scourge of domestic violence she was hoping to fight, or
if she became a tragic victim of a national fixation on crime and self-defense.
Mr. Pistorius maintains
that he killed her by accident, believing that she was an intruder who had
climbed through an open window nearby. In the dark, he said, he had not noticed
that Ms. Steenkamp, 29, was no longer on her side of the bed.
South Africa’s
prosecutors have rejected his version of events, calling the explanation
unrealistic and putting forth a picture of Mr. Pistorius as a hotheaded,
reckless young man with a tendency toward jealous behavior.
For now, Mr. Pistorius,
26, is out on bail, living in his uncle’s house in Pretoria and awaiting his next court hearing on June 4. Family
members describe him as in mourning. Last week, his public relations company
announced that he was holding a private memorial for Ms. Steenkamp in his
uncle’s house, a move that was met with skepticism in the South African news
media.
If there was trouble in
the relationship, none have yet stepped up to say they knew about it. Ms.
Myers, a makeup artist who talked to Ms. Steenkamp frequently in her last
weeks, said everything appeared normal between the young couple. Mr.
Pistorius’s friends, in affidavits to the court, said that he was in love and
not afraid to say so. He was making plans to have her travel with him to races,
something he had never done before.
A Hard Worker
Still, by many accounts
they were an odd match. Ms. Steenkamp, despite her embrace of the limelight,
rarely went to nightclubs, didn’t like to drink and was known for her banana
bread, friends and family say. One of her favorite activities was to get in bed
with a cup of tea. Those who knew her well said that she was a hard worker,
always with a smile, though she often worried about making enough money to help
support her parents in their retirement.
Mr. Pistorius, by
contrast, liked fast cars, gun ranges and Johannesburg’s night life. In
January, according to the police, he was involved in the accidental discharge
of a gun at a shopping mall cafe. Before that, the police said, he had
threatened to beat up a man at a racetrack and break another man’s legs. On
another occasion, he was arrested on an assault charge and spent the night in
jail. A spokesman for Mr. Pistorius said he would not comment on those matters
or any others.
Ms. Steenkamp’s cousin,
Kim Martin, who had breakfast with the couple recently, could not help thinking
that Mr. Pistorius was not at all like Ms. Steenkamp’s last boyfriend. “Her old
boyfriend was much more like her,” she said, “a quiet guy, family oriented.”
Whatever the result of
the trial, the events have sent South Africans into a frenzy of
self-examination. Some see the case as yet another reminder that South Africa
remains a violent society and one in which many whites, like Mr. Pistorius,
live in heavily guarded communities, but still fear attacks by the black
majority and feel entitled to take matters into their own hands.
Mr. Pistorius, who was
born without fibulas and had his legs amputated below the knee as an infant,
seemed obsessed with his personal safety. He slept with a gun by his bed and
kept a cricket bat handy. He sometimes went to a shooting range when he had
trouble sleeping at night, cheerily tweeting about his shooting prowess and how
he had gone into “full combat recon mode” in November when he came home and
thought there was an intruder in his spacious house in the Silver Lakes Estates
in Pretoria. It turned out to be nothing more than a washing machine.
In fact, the home
invasion Mr. Pistorius feared represents only a tiny percentage of crimes in
South Africa, and is even more rare within gated communities like his, which
are often protected by brick walls, electric fences, motion sensors and video
cameras. Of the 2 million serious crimes reported every year, roughly 16,000
are home invasion robberies, according to Rudolph Zinn, a criminologist at the
University of South Africa. The vast majority of violent crime is committed by blacks
and against blacks.
Some columnists here
have criticized Mr. Pistorius for saying that he was worried for his safety
when he shot into the small toilet enclosure without waiting to hear the
intruder’s voice. “The man dubbed as the blade runner has articulated, to the
point of triteness, the most popularly espoused white, middle-class South
African paranoia,” Niren Tolsiwrote in a commentary for the weekly Mail and Guardian.
For those more inclined
to believe that he shot Ms. Steenkamp in a rage, her death focused the
spotlight on violence against women. And just as the shooting of young children
at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., seemed to grab America’s attention
in a way that other mass murders had not, the death of Ms. Steenkamp set off an
outpouring of soul searching about the macho culture of South African men.
“This is very much
linked to a dominant South African masculinity in which guns are an archetypal
symbol of masculine strength,” said Rachel Jewkes, director of the Gender and
Health Research Unit of the South African Medical Research Council.
Others are skeptical
about Mr. Pistorius’s claim that he was not wearing his prosthetics at the time
of the shooting and hence felt more vulnerable. One colleague of Ms. Steenkamp
asked why someone who felt scared did not simply call the police or get out of
the room.
But there are also ample
doubts about the police force, which is notoriously inept at investigating
serious crime. Even at this early stage, the performance of the police has been
far from convincing.
Their initial assertion
that there had “previously been allegations of a domestic nature” involving Mr.
Pistorius has not yet been supported in court. The lead officer in the case,Hilton Botha, turned out to be facing attempted
murder charges of his own. And he told the court that testosterone had been
found at the scene, though the substance had not been tested. It was later
identified as an herbal supplement that Mr. Pistorius’s publicity agent said he
used for “muscle recovery” but that is also injected for sexual enhancement.
Because there is only
one survivor of the events that night, the case against Mr. Pistorius will
inevitably rely heavily on forensic and ballistic evidence, experts say. Some
worry whether the police are capable.
“I have no confidence in
them whatsoever,” said David Klatzow, a leading forensic expert. “It grieves
me, it embarrasses me, and it embarrasses many of the last remaining competent
people who remain in the police force.”
Mr. Pistorius’s sudden
fall from grace shocked many in South Africa and elsewhere, including some
people who knew him. In much of the country, he was a beloved symbol of the
power of will over adversity.
“He seemed really
down-to-earth, extremely gracious, not arrogant, not your typical Olympic or
professional athlete,” said Steven Ungerleider, an American sports psychologist
who had met Mr. Pistorius on several occasions.
Still, Mr. Ungerleider
said, “I have seen and interviewed people who come across as very gracious, and
we find out later that they have had some anger management issues, or had
issues with jealousy.”
Unsavory Behavior
Some South African
journalists are, in fact, taking themselves to task for failing to highlight
more of Mr. Pistorius’s less savory behavior.
He crashed a speedboat
on the Vaal River in 2009, injuring himself badly and ending up in intensive
care. No charges were ever filed, but photographs at the scene showed empty
bottles of alcohol on the boat.
That year, he was
arrested on an assault charge after an altercation with a female guest at a
party at his home. Mr. Pistorius has said that the woman was drunk and that
after he asked her to leave she returned to get her purse and tried to break
down his door. But the woman, Cassidy Taylor-Memmory, who also lives at Silver
Estates, tells a different story.
According to her lawyer,
Ms. Taylor-Memmory was a friend of Mr. Pistorius’s girlfriend at the time.
After the couple had a fight during the barbecue, she left the party with her
friend but returned to get her belongings. At that point, Mr. Pistorius slammed
the door so hard a piece of the doorway broke off and hit Ms. Taylor-Memmory’s
leg, injuring her enough to require surgery.
The prosecutor decided
there was not enough evidence to proceed with the assault charge, her lawyer
said, and both sides have sued over the altercation.
“It was a bit of a mass
confusion,” Mr. Pistorius said in a television interview at the time. “It ended
up turning completely sour. I had to spend the night in jail, which I never
thought I would have to do. It was quite hectic.”
According to the police,
Mr. Pistorius was also involved in a verbal altercation at a racetrack with the
boyfriend of one of his ex-girlfriends in which he threatened to beat the man.
Mark Batchelor, a friend of the man, confronted Mr. Pistorius later, and the
runner threatened to break his legs, Mr. Batchelor said.
During a television
interview, Mr. Batchelor described Mr. Pistorius as possessive and obsessed
with his own fame. “I think Oscar got into that status where every woman wanted
him, every business wanted to do business with him,” Mr. Batchelor said. “He
started believing that.”
Another episode that
raised eyebrows took place in January, at a popular cafe in a suburban
Johannesburg shopping mall. A friend passed a handgun to Mr. Pistorius under a
table, and the gun went off, witnesses said.
The event was not
reported to the police, and the friend took the blame for the gunshot, Kevin
Lerena, a boxer and acquaintance of Mr. Pistorius who was there at the time,
said in a televised interview. Mr. Lerena said the gun had gone off by mistake,
missing his toe by less than an inch.
“You know, we are men,
we are guys,” Mr. Lerena said. “People go out and have drinks and have fun.
Whether testosterone is flying and tempers are flying, that’s normal. Never,
ever did it come across that I thought he had demons or bad vibes about him.”
Ms. Steenkamp was
introduced to Mr. Pistorius by a mutual friend, Justin Divaris, who owns a car
dealership and had asked Mr. Pistorius to be an ambassador for his business.
Mr. Divaris was sponsoring an event at the Kyalami racetrack and invited both
of them to sit at his table, according to an affidavit he gave to the court.
The attraction between
Mr. Pistorius and Ms. Steenkamp was apparent immediately, he said. Mr.
Pistorius asked her to accompany him “as a friend” to a sporting awards dinner
soon afterward. Later that night, he told Mr. Divaris that Ms. Steenkamp was
terrific and that they had “really hit it off.”
When pictures from the
awards dinner hit the papers, Ms. Martin couldn’t resist calling her cousin. “I
said, ‘So are you dating Oscar now?’ and Reeva laughed. She said, ‘No, but I
wouldn’t mind. I admire him a lot.’ ”
Before she met Mr.
Pistorius, Ms. Steenkamp, who had studied law, was living a quiet life, working
steadily but without any major breakthroughs. She was too short for runway work
and mostly did catalogs and commercials. She wanted to act, but suffered a lot
of rejection, Ms. Martin said, adding that “she was giving it until she was
30.”
When work died down for
the season in Johannesburg, she would live in Cape Town with Ms. Martin for
several months and work there. But lately things were looking up and she could
not have been more thrilled, Ms. Martin said. She had just finished a
television reality show and signed with new management.
“It was infectious being
around her,” Ms. Martin said. “She would take my girls into her room and they would
sit on the bed and talk and talk.”
“She wanted children,”
she added. “I think she would have been the most amazing mother.”