by Mandy Wiener
Before long several police officers from the South African Police Service (SAPS) strode out to the waiting cameras and microphones to address the world’s media. Responsibility for communication of this matter had been escalated from police station level – Boschkop – to Gauteng provincial level.
Brigadier Denise Beukes, her blonde hair neatly tucked away under a SAPS-issue cap and her lipstick pristine, led the briefing. She was composed and measured, selecting her words carefully as she delivered her statement:
We can confirm that there was a shooting incident this morning at the home of the well-known Paralympic athlete Oscar Pistorius. At this stage we can confirm a young woman, a thirty-year-old woman, did die on the scene of gunshot wounds. A 26-year-old male has been arrested and charged with murder. At this stage he is on his way to a visit to the district surgeon for a medical examination and will be appearing in the Pretoria Magistrate’s Court at two o’clock this afternoon. We have also taken cognisance of media reports during the course of the morning of an alleged break-in or that the young lady was allegedly mistaken to be a burglar. We’re not sure where this report came from; it definitely didn’t come from the South African Police Service. Our detectives have been on the scene; our forensic investigators have been on the scene and the investigation is ongoing.
Her comments took most journalists by surprise and, for the first time, the story began to shift. The only version until that point had been that Oscar had mistaken Reeva for an intruder and that the shooting had been a terrible mistake. Initial reports even suggested that Reeva had been sneaking into his house to surprise him for Valentine’s Day. Now it appeared the scenario could be very different.
To the surprise of some reporters who had gathered, Beukes took questions. The first enquiry was whether or not she could identify the deceased?
‘At this stage the challenge that we’ve got is that her family has not identified her and so until her family has identified her, we’re not at liberty to give her name to the media, unfortunately,’ Beukes explained, using her hands for extra emphasis.
Others wanted to know why Oscar was going to the district surgeon and whether he was receiving some kind of special treatment by appearing in court so swiftly after his arrest.
‘Look, obviously when a person has been accused of a crime like murder they look at things like testing under the fingernails, taking a blood alcohol sample and other standard medical tests that are done,’ Beukes said, insisting that there was no special treatment at all. ‘If a person requests to be brought to court, then it is possible. The person was arrested this morning, he was taken to the police station like any other person who is detained and arrested. We will be opposing bail; he will be bringing a bail application this afternoon and we will be opposing bail.’
Then, without skipping a beat, Beukes dropped another soundbite that would fuel speculation surrounding a potential motive. She was asked whether or not eyewitnesses had been interviewed.
‘There are witnesses that have been interviewed,’ she confirmed. ‘We’re talking about neighbours that had heard things earlier in the evening and when the shooting took place. I can confirm that there has previously been incidents at the home of Oscar Pistorius. I’m not going to elaborate on that, just that there have been previous incidents … of allegations of a domestic nature.’
Could this illustrate a pattern of domestic altercations?
Beukes closed the impromptu briefing at the entrance to the Silver Woods estate by confirming that there were no signs of forced entry on the property and reiterating her earlier statement that initial media reports did not emanate from the police.
‘The SAPS were just as surprised to hear over the radio that the allegations had been made that the deceased had been perceived to be a burglar. We were very surprised, and those allegations did not come from us,’ she said.
Around 5 kilometres away, at the Boschkop police station, Oscar was just arriving. The police station is located amongst smallholdings in the far east of Pretoria. Except for the luxury estates close to the city, it serves mostly the semi-rural areas stretching to the border with Bronkhorstspruit. It was nearing midday when, despite the scorching summer sun high in the sky, the athlete, dressed in grey tracksuit pants and a grey hoodie, was escorted into the building amidst an entourage of police, family members and lawyers. Photographers were already waiting. Oscar’s brother Carl covered Oscar’s head with a tracksuit, shielding his face from the snapping lenses while their sister Aimee trailed behind. Within an hour, the paperwork had been filed and Oscar was moved to the Mamelodi Day Clinic where the district surgeon on duty would be responsible for drawing blood and taking urine samples. He would also make observations about the accused’s physical appearance and carry out any other tests required.
As glass vials filled with Oscar’s blood in Mamelodi, journalists who had been briefed by the police at his house sped off to their next location in anticipation of a bail application. Oscar was scheduled to appear at 2pm but no one was quite sure where. The athlete’s lawyers wanted to bring the bail application that afternoon but, at such short notice, it was unlikely they would find an opening on the roll at the Pretoria Magistrate’s Court. It then emerged that his lawyers wanted to try the court at the Pretoria Central Prison. A magistrate was alerted and assigned, and the media started gathering.
But as the day went on, it was clear Oscar wouldn’t have time to apply for bail. The courts stop operating at 4pm. While the media’s speculation turned to the possibility of a last-minute urgent application in the North Gauteng High Court, Oscar’s lawyers and family were preparing him for his first night in jail at the Boschkop police station.
Fall from Grace – Mandy Wiener
We crowded around the flat-screen television in the newsroom, our necks craned to watch as Brigadier Denise Beukes’s press conference was broadcast live. There was a sharp intake of breath and a chorus of exclamations as the policewoman disregarded reports that had been running all morning about the shooting being a mere accident. When she revealed that there had been previous incidents at Oscar’s house of a domestic nature, we knew that the story had completely flipped.
I hammered on my keyboard as Beukes continued to speak, live-tweeting her statement to a public desperate for any new information about the incident. Details were, as we say in the industry, ‘sketchy’, and there had been little to no official confirmation of anything. For nearly three hours, there was only speculation and presumption feeding the media machine.
At first, I didn’t quite comprehend the magnitude of the story we were dealing with but within minutes of the news breaking, it reverberated around the world. It took less than five minutes for my cellphone to ring – a major international news network looking for an interview, quickly.
Amidst the confusion and the chaos of an unfolding story, I raced into my Sandton office and began working the phones, managing the story from there while Barry was on the scene in Pretoria.
One of the initial major journalistic hurdles was to confirm the identity of the victim and to ensure that her relatives and friends had been informed before announcing her name on air. We knew that Oscar had been photographed with the glamorous, striking blonde reality television star Reeva Steenkamp over the previous weeks and their pictures had been published in the entertainment pages. The hashtag #ReevaSteenkamp was also trending on Twitter but we needed on-the-record confirmation.
A colleague gave me a number for Reeva’s modelling agent, Sarit Tomlinson, and I immediately called her. When Sarit answered I could tell straight away that she was in pieces. Her job is to publicise the fabulous, not deal with this kind of crisis management on an incomprehensible global scale. Sarit had Reeva’s parents on the other line and just didn’t know what to tell them. She agreed on a brief, generic comment: ‘Reeva’s parents are in Port Elizabeth; we are all in shock and are in communication with people on the scene but we need to wait for official statements.’
A close fri
end of June Steenkamp, Samantha Sutton, also spoke about what was unfolding in Port Elizabeth: ‘The parents are both in a bad way. We got medication from the family doctor to calm them down and are giving them tea. Her mother keeps saying “Reeva can’t be dead” and she doesn’t believe she is gone.’
As the morning passed, the story exploded and the full extent of the implications began to set in. Every radio station, TV network, news website and blog across the world wanted to speak to someone in South Africa and our newsroom phones lit up. Together with my colleagues, we did dozens of crossings. As we hung up, we would lift the handset again to do another. And as the news gathered momentum, we watched Oscar’s fame, reputation and career unravel.
On Rivonia Road, the busiest street in Sandton, workmen in blue overalls and luminous yellow safety straps climbed a ladder to the summit of a billboard and began to pull down a massive poster bearing Oscar’s face and the words ‘Every Night is Oscar Night’. Television network M-Net had withdrawn its entire Academy Awards live coverage campaign featuring the athlete ‘out of respect and sympathy to the bereaved’. The massive poster drooped down, Oscar’s smiling face dangling upside down as it fell from grace. The image spoke volumes.
On Oscar’s official website, the banner featured the sprinter in green-and–black racing gear exploding out of his starting blocks with the strapline ‘I am the bullet in the chamber’. After some time and prodding from the public, the unfortunately timed banner was removed.
At the same time, there were intense deliberations about whether or not the reality series Tropika Island of Treasure, featuring Reeva, should continue premiering in a few days as planned. Samantha Moon, the executive producer and creator, confirmed that they had decided to go ahead with airing the show. She commented:
The more we thought about it, the more I felt quite strongly that right now the country and the world knows Reeva as a model with amazing images of this beautiful girl. But what we have is proof of how wonderful she was. For me, the fact that South Africa will get to know this girl that we love and feel the loss of very deeply, I feel that if we were not to air it, we would be in some way contributing to erasing her. I would like everyone to know her as an intelligent, fierce, fearless woman. She was exceptionally caring and generous and truly loving. One of the things the contestants often joked about was that you couldn’t be in Reeva’s company for five minutes without being afflicted by ‘Reeva Fever’.
Meanwhile, we waited for clarity on whether there would be a formal bail application in the afternoon. That night South African president Jacob Zuma delivered his annual state of the nation address in parliament. I cast my mind back to the previous year when Zuma had praised Oscar in his address. ‘Our star performer, Oscar Pistorius, has set the standard for the year by winning the 2012 Laureus Award. Congratulations,’ Zuma proudly boasted to the country. This year the Paralympian’s shadow hung over the event like a cloud.
After my final live TV crossing for the night from the windy rooftop of a building in central Johannesburg, I took a moment to digest the unfathomable, surreal events of the day.
While I had fielded calls from radio and TV stations in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Spain, the Czech Republic and other more remote countries, facts were regurgitated and so were the questions. They were mostly about Oscar.
At home, as South Africans, we struggled to come to terms with the news, not wanting to comprehend the truth of what might have occurred in Oscar’s bathroom that night. We justified, contemplated hypotheses and drove speculation about why he would have shot and killed his girlfriend. The country had been rocked to its very core. Then, true to form, we began to joke. The reality was simply too much to bear. And in South Africa, reality is often stranger than fiction. South Africa repeatedly produces material that not even a best-selling crime writer could conceptualise. Perhaps that is why it is so difficult for us to deal with reality. It just seems, well, too unreal.
Oscar had brought us such pride on the world’s stage and now the veneer had been stripped off, the gloss was horribly tarnished.
Five months earlier, I had been in London with the Paralympics in full swing and the Blade Runner riding the crest of a spectacular wave of popularity. He had been the first disabled athlete to run in the able-bodied Olympics and was the unofficial face of the Paralympic games.
I woke one morning in my hotel room to screaming headlines about a controversy. Oscar had been the man to beat in the 200 metres final but had come up short, and he had accused the winner, Brazilian Alan Fonteles Oliveira, of having an unfair advantage because his blades were too long. Oscar had spent years fighting claims that carbon-fibre prosthetics were an advantage compared to human legs.
That Monday morning, there was little sympathy for Oscar. It was the first indication I, and many others, had that the gloss of the golden boy might be tarnished. There was talk about how the outburst might have ruined his brand. He issued a statement apologising for the timing of his comments after the race but, in essence, he stayed true to his complaint. The damage had been done and the seed had been planted.
Watching the criticism build on television breakfast shows, I tweeted:
#OscarPistorius Views here in UK are that ‘Oscar can’t have it all, he must choose’ vs. sympathy that he’s a victim of his own success. Sentiment definitely seems to be against him.
Now, less than 24 hours since the shooting at his house, stories began to emerge of a rather different Oscar. Of a petulant, hot-headed young man prone to flashes of anger. Rumours began to surface of the questionable circles he was moving in; so too did anecdotes about bad behaviour, a passion for fast cars and lethal firearms. I reflected on all of this and wondered why it had not been picked up sooner. Did we, the media, choose to ignore the leads and the stories because it was our hero Oscar?
On the Joburg rooftop I flicked through my phone and reread a litany of messages that had come through during the day amidst an overwhelming bombardment of calls. Some were from a mutual friend, one who was mourning a deep loss. It was one of those poignant, unique moments in which I had to pause and shift from the sometimes surreal frenzy of the news machine and allow reality to sink in. Until then it had been all Oscar, Oscar, Oscar: the Blade Runner, Paralympics golden boy, worldwide icon, PR machine.
I hadn’t realised until that point that Reeva Steenkamp and I shared several mutual friends and yet had never met. In the messages left on my phone, they all spoke glowingly of her with genuine love and affection:
Reeva loved tea. She thought it was a universal panacea and any problem could be solved with it. She also loved scones.
She was a Leo and we were planning her 30th in Vegas. She would drop anything to come to you if you needed her or felt sad.
She was mad about Oscar, completely in love with him, as he was about her.
She wanted to be famous.
I realised that for Reeva Steenkamp’s family, the reality of her absence would be unmistakable. For her friends, who were once afflicted by ‘Reeva Fever’, there would be no denying the reality of her bloody, tragic end. For Oscar, the incomprehensible reality of the nightmare he was in would only just be beginning to dawn.
The First Appearance
The Pretoria Magistrate’s Court shares the same block as the Pretoria Central police station, sandwiched between Pretorius and Frances Baard streets and Bosman and Sophie de Bruyn streets. The older and original section of the court building, with its marbled facade and pillared entrance, was gutted by fire in 2010 and remains a burnt shell. The pavement overhang at the Schoeman Street entrance to the newer magistrate’s court building is the overnight shelter for half a dozen city vagrants and the smell of stale urine and rotting rubbish permeate the air as you walk through the large steel doors into the court complex. Once you’re through the ageing metal detectors and into the gloom of the officious facebrick corridors, the waft of oily hot potato chips from the canteen is overwhelming.
Chief Magistrate Desmon
d Nair’s office is deep within the bowels of the building. It sits beyond a heavy metal door, a uniformed security guard and a clumsily taped-over intercom system, at the end of a rabbit warren of passageways on the ground floor. The labyrinth of corridors opens into a small waiting room with a bench and discarded wooden table holding a visitors’ register, and then into a large spacious office featuring an impressive boardroom table with plush chairs and a royal ruby carpet. The office has no windows and is lined with wood panels and legal journals while brown cardboard folders are piled up on the floor, each one holding the contents of disciplinary cases against colleagues on which Nair is working.
The moustachioed lawman is small in stature, but large in presence. He’s occupied this office since being appointed Chief Magistrate of the Pretoria region and its contents are testament to the years of familiarity. Well-worn legal handbooks are within an arm’s reach for quick reference, his black-and-red robe is slung over a coat stand behind him and three separate images of Nelson Mandela hang on the walls. A toilet roll, a yellow-scented oil candle, teacups, piles of paper and stationery clutter the polished red-wood desk.
Nair had arrived at work on Thursday morning, 14 February 2013, and had taken his seat at his desk. He had not heard the news on the drive into work. Only once he was into the swing of the morning, was he told by the Acting Senior Magistrate at the court that he had received a message from prosecutors that Oscar Pistorius had been arrested.
The investigating officer Hilton Botha would have called the Magistrate’s Court to let officials there know that he had a high high-profile case that needed to be allocated. Chief Prosecutor at the Pretoria Magistrate’s Court, Matric Luphondo, discussed the matter with the Senior Public Prosecutor for the region, Sibongile Mzinyathi, and together they took the decision to allocate the case to Advocates Gerrie Nel and Andrea Johnson.