Oscar Pistorius has admitted he deserves a long jail sentence for
killing Reeva Steenkamp but vehemently denied he murdered her, insisting
that the 2013 shooting was not premeditated. In his first TV interview
since Reeva's death, Pistorius said he "couldn’t disagree" with those
who felt he should be punished.
"At times I don’t feel like I should have the right to live for taking
someone else’s life. What’s difficult is dealing with the charge of
murder," he said.
But Pistorius said he did not want to "waste my life" behind bars.
"If I was afforded the opportunity of redemption I would like to help
the less fortunate like I had in my past," he said. "I would like to
believe that if Reeva could look down upon me that she would want me to
live that life."
Pistorius made the comments during an interview with ITV, to be
broadcast at 9pm on Friday. The interview – at times frank, at other
points self-exculpatory, and with moments of prolonged sobbing and even
howling – comes days before a South African judge will sentence
Pistorius for murder.
He was convicted in 2014 of manslaughter, but last year the conviction
was upgraded to murder following an appeal by state prosecutors. The
minimum sentence for murder in South Africa is 15 years. However, legal
experts say judge Thokozile Masipa has considerable powers of
discretion.
In the interview, Pistorius – who made his name as an Olympic and
Paralympic athlete, reaching the 400m semi-finals of London 2012 – stuck
to the same account he has given of the shooting of Steenkamp on 14
February 2013, Valentine’s Day, inside his gated home in Pretoria. He
said Steenkamp’s death was a tragic accident caused by his sincere
belief that an intruder was breaking into the apartment.
Pistorius said he arrived home just after 6pm to find Reeva “smiling and
giddy and just bubbly”. She had cooked a romantic meal and laid the
table with a candle. After, they lay down on the bed and chatted, he
said, adding that “when I came in the room I placed my firearm on the
left hand side of the bed”.
The athlete said he took his prosthetic legs off and fell asleep. It was “pitch dark”. At 3am he woke.
"I heard this noise coming from the bathroom," he said. “It was a sliding noise of the window frame hitting the frame."
He claimed he immediately got panicked and believed that “someone was
actually in the process of breaking in, possibly with a ladder.
The athlete said he scooped up his firearm and, believing Steenkamp was
still in the room, whispered to her to get down and ring the police. He
said he was terrified as he walked toward the bathroom on his stumps,
gun in hand.
"All of a sudden I heard a noise, at the toilet. I presumed it was the
toilet door opening and before I know it I’d fired four shots."
Prosecutors have dismissed Pistorius’s account as lies. They say the
athlete murdered Steenkamp after a row prompted by his jealousy over an
ex-boyfriend. They say she fled to the bathroom and barricaded herself
in the toilet, pursued by Pistorius who first tried to smash the door
down with a cricket bat and then returned with his 9mm weapon, firing
into the door from point-blank range.
Pistorius said he felt a moment of horror when he realised Steenkamp was
not in the bed but then experienced a short-lived “sense of calm”,
thinking that she was hiding on the floor. He got down on the floor,
however, and realised he still couldn’t feel her.
"So I start pulling everything apart and I start saying like, Reeva,
Reeva Reeva, and I’m like pulling my hand and I’m on my stumps now
still, I was like pulling my hand across the curtain … thinking like
‘lord please tell me she’s hiding behind the curtains’. And I get to the
end of the curtains and my heart just sinks."
Pistorius said he looped back to the bathroom, and broke down the door
to to the toilet with a cricket bat, ripping out one plank. Inside, he
found Steenkamp slumped on the toilet. She was dead. There was blood
everywhere, he said.
He said he put her on the bathroom floor, placing a towel under her
head. “I just see blood and it’s just blood everywhere ... So much
blood! I try and pick her up. I’m trying to pick her up but there’s so
much blood I can’t stand up.
"And I thought Reeva had started breathing, so I had my fingers in her
mouth and I was trying to give her mouth to mouth, but there was so much
blood."
Pistorius told ITV he "saw the pain" he had caused and said that most of
his mutual friends with Steenkamp “don’t speak to me any more”. One
woman had spotted him shopping in Pretoria and had screamed at the store
for allowing him in. He put down his basket and left, he said.
He denied some of the allegations levelled against him, including that
he had behaved violently to Steenkamp before he shot her, hitting her
with a cricket bat, and that he had taken steroids. Asked whether he was
violent towards women, he said: "No, not at all."
The athlete said he owned nine to 11 firearms, and had ordered a
semi-automatic assault rifle, but added that he kept only his 9mm gun at
home. Asked why he needed such an arsenal, Pistorius said that like all
South Africans he had direct and traumatic personal experience of
violent crime.
He said when he was growing up his father had been hijacked and beaten,
and his brother hijacked, while a cousin who lived nearby was robbed at
home in the middle of the day.
"I don’t know anybody in South Africa that hasn’t experienced some form
of crime." The dark consequence was "you get this fear … It’s just the
reality we live in."
Source: ITV/the guardian
linda Ikeji.com
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