One Tragic Night (4 page)

Johan Stipp still felt compelled to act despite security already being en route to the scene. He was concerned that there might be children involved in the incident and, having kids of his own, he was worried it could be a family tragedy.
He quickly dressed, climbed into his SUV, drove first to the guardhouse at the entrance to the estate, to check if it was safe, and then proceeded to Oscar's home.

Mike Nhlengethwa had watched the exchange between the Stipps and Baba. Initially he remarked to his wife that the crying must be coming from the Stipps' house. But then he saw the security vehicle speed away. It made a left turn and did a loop, passing his own house. Moments later, a white SUV also pulled out from the Stipps' house and made a right turn, doing a loop in the opposite direction.

Mike realised that the disturbance must be closer to his own home and moved to another room in the house to see if he could get a better look. His study looks onto Bush Willow Crescent and, peeking through the horizontal wooden blinds in that room, he saw the security vehicle pull up in front of Oscar's house.

He knew his neighbour relatively well. They often greeted each other on the street and just days before Oscar had introduced Reeva Steenkamp to Mike as his fiancée.

Mike knew he wouldn't be able to get back to sleep and now that security had arrived, it seemed safe to go outside. Like Johan Stipp, he felt the need to go to see what was happening. He threw on some clothes, switched on the lights and went downstairs.

Rika Motshuane heard a car pass by her home and turn into the street outside Oscar's house. Overcoming her fear, she got out of bed and looked through a window that faced in that direction. From the window she saw a Mini Cooper coming to a stop in Oscar's driveway.

Rika climbed back into bed but struggled to sleep. She was still shaken and wondered what had happened. Then she heard another car. Again, she looked out the window and saw that a security vehicle had also arrived at the house.

Rika urged Kenneth to phone security to find out what was going on. The guard told him they were taking care of the situation but offered no further details about what was unfolding at their neighbour's house. But the Motshuanes knew the situation was grave. The screams had been terrifying.

It was 3:19:03 when Johan Stander's cellphone rang. He looked at the handset and saw that the caller was Oscar Pistorius. At that hour of the morning, he knew it must be urgent.

‘Oom Johan, please, please, please come to my house. Please. I shot Reeva. I
thought she was an intruder. Please, please, come quick,' was how Stander would later recall the conversation.

The voice on the other end of the line was desperate.

Stander and Oscar first met in May 2009 when the Standers moved into the Silver Woods estate. The athlete arrived at their home in Summerbrook Close, several blocks from his own house, and offered to help them move their furniture in. Over the years they became increasingly friendly – Oscar and Stander's daughter Carice Viljoen became friends, occasionally meeting for coffee, and Stander looked after Oscar's dogs when the athlete travelled overseas to train and compete.

Stander's wife woke up as he scrambled out of bed and headed for the bedroom door. As he opened it, Carice came out of her bedroom.

‘I heard someone screaming for help. Someone's in trouble,' she said to her father.

‘It must have been Oscar,' Carice's mother explained. ‘He called your dad and said he shot Reeva.'

It was the screams for help and not the phone call to her father that woke Carice. The petite blonde, a legal adviser by profession, had gone to bed at around 8 or 9pm the previous evening, as per usual. It was a hot summer night and she left the sliding door to her balcony open and the room's blinds pulled all the way up. In the early hours of the morning, she was startled by her dogs barking in her room where they usually sleep. Annoyed and tired, she lay in bed thinking about how she would have to get up and close the sliding door so that her dogs didn't rush out onto the balcony and wake the neighbours. But she could hear other dogs in the neighbourhood barking too.

Just as she was about to roll out of bed, Carice heard a person shouting, ‘Help! Help! Help!' It was a man's voice, she was sure.

Carice froze. Her first thought was that she had to close the sliding door because someone could climb up to her balcony and she could be in danger. The neighbours' dogs began to bark even more and Carice slipped out of bed and went to stand at the sliding door. She dropped the blinds, leaving them tilted very slightly and left the door open a crack. She kept her ear at the opening to hear where the sound came from – she couldn't tell, but she knew someone needed help.

Her heart pounding, Carice shut the door and latched it. She closed the blinds and climbed back into bed. The dogs remained restless, and she was afraid. She contemplated what to do next. Her heart was beating furiously and she knew she wouldn't be able to settle back to sleep. Her dogs were at the foot of her bed
and continued to bark madly so she reached for them and brought them close to her in the hope of calming them down. She pulled the covers back over herself.

As she lay in bed, she suddenly picked up movement in her parents' bedroom, which she could see into from her own room. She saw the lights going on and that her mother and father were both awake.

Again, Carice quickly got out of bed and ran to find out what was going on and to tell her parents she had heard someone screaming for help. In the passage, Johan and his daughter decided they needed to get to Oscar's house as quickly as possible and that she would drive them.

Carice raced downstairs, pulled her silver Mini Cooper out of the garage and waited for her father in the street. When he finally appeared, she was so anxious she struggled to push in the clutch to change gears.

She chose the quickest route, driving fast around the corners to Oscar's house nearly 600 metres away. The trip was so short that Carice later estimated that only three minutes passed between Oscar's phone call to her father and the time they arrived at his house.

As Carice pulled up outside the house, she brought the Mini to an abrupt halt in the street and she and her father rushed up the driveway. There were already men standing on the pavement and she asked them what was going on, but they were confused and didn't know.

Frank Chiziweni, the man who works at Oscar's house, was there. So too were the three security guards, Baba, Makgoba and Ndimande. Baba could see on the neighbours' faces they were worried that something serious had taken place.

Through the two vertical glass panes alongside the large double wooden front doors, Carice could see the lights on in the house. She could also see that one of the doors had been left slightly open. As she rushed up the narrow tiled pathway, between rectangular ponds on either side, she glimpsed a man making his way down the staircase inside, a woman in his arms, her head and limbs dangling lifelessly.

Her father and the three security guards trailing behind her saw him too. Carice put her hand on the wooden door and, without much effort, it swung open, revealing something of the nightmare that had unfolded inside.

From the second Carice walked into the house, she could see that Oscar was distraught. He was walking fast down the second flight of stairs from the landing; Reeva was in his arms, her bloodied head resting on his left forearm.

Johan Stander noticed the immediate relief on the runner's face as they stepped through the door, perhaps because help had arrived. Stander could tell that Reeva had suffered a terrible head wound.

Baba, the security guard, was in shock. He was so flabbergasted he couldn't quite grasp what he was seeing and only regained ‘consciousness', as he put it, when he heard Carice shout ‘Oscar!' According to Baba, the athlete had told him on the phone that everything was fine and yet what he saw now was in direct contrast to what he recalled the man saying to him. He chose to remain outside the front door rather than rush in to help.

‘Carice, please, Carice, please, can we just put her in the car and get her to the hospital?' Oscar begged.

‘No, can you please just put her down so we can see what's wrong?' she responded.

Oscar placed Reeva at the foot of the stairs. All Carice could see was blood. Oscar was, however, desperate for them to put Reeva in a car and rush her to hospital.

‘He was a young man, walking down the stairs with a lady, with a young woman in his arms and the scene you see, the expression on his face … the expression of sorrow, the expression of pain. He is crying. He is praying. He is asking God to help him. He was torn apart. Broken, desperate, pleading. It is difficult really to describe and his commitment to save the young lady's life. How he begged her to stay with him. How he begged God to keep her alive,' Stander later recalled about the events. ‘I saw the truth there that morning. I saw it and I feel it.'

Oscar put his fingers in Reeva's mouth to try to keep her airway open so that she could breathe. He was kneeling on one side of Reeva with Carice on the other. He continued to plead with Carice to rush Reeva to the hospital. Stander stepped outside to phone for help and call for an ambulance.

On the pavement outside, Stander instructed Baba to call the police and paramedics. He also issued instructions to Makgoba and Ndimande. Makgoba was to wait at the gate to escort the police and ambulance to the scene while Ndimande was responsible for keeping the area outside the house clear. Then Stander got on his own phone and tried to call for help.

Inside the house, the scene was frantic.

‘Oscar, we're phoning the ambulance. Just wait. Let's see what we can do,' Carice responded to Oscar's persistent requests to get Reeva to a hospital. She knew they had to stem the bleeding and that she needed towels to do this.

Carice ran upstairs to the landing and, in the dark, grabbed a bundle of towels
from the linen cupboard, dropping one on the floor in her haste.

She could hear Oscar praying, pleading with God to save Reeva's life and also pleading with Reeva. ‘Stay with me, my love … Stay with me,' he begged.

Carice scrunched up the towels and pushed them down on the wounds to try to stop the bleeding. She then tried to make a crude tourniquet with one of the towels to stem the flow on Reeva's right arm. She knew she had to tie it as tight as possible and asked Oscar to help her by holding one side while she pulled the other.

Then she lifted the elastic of Reeva's white shorts and, like a sea, a rush of blood was released. Oscar put pressure down on the towel, trying to dam the flow.

In the frenzy of trying to stop the bleeding, Carice glanced up at her friend and asked, ‘Oscar, what happened?'

He looked back at her and said, ‘I thought she was an intruder.' She chose not to ask him any more questions.

The towels, however, weren't stemming the flow so Carice asked Oscar for bags and tape in order to tie the fabric even tighter. At this point he still had his fingers in Reeva's mouth, trying to help her breathe, so when he stood up to fetch bags and tape, he asked Carice to take over.

By the time he returned with bags and tape, Oscar was still desperate for the paramedics to arrive and kept asking, ‘Where is the ambulance? Where are they?' So Carice decided to go outside to her father to find out how far away help was, although she must have known that in reality it was already too late for help.