A neighbour of Oscar Pistorius, Charl Johnson, is giving evidence on the third day of the murder trial, Pistorius who is accused of murdering his girlfriend in his home in the pre-dawn hours of Valentine’s Day last year.
Charl Johnson resumed his evidence after telling the Pretoria court yesterday that he heard screams and gunshots on the night Pistorius killed Reeva Steenkamp. Mr Johnson’s wife Michelle Burger has already given testimony .
A second witness at the trial yesterday said she was kept from sleeping on the night the athlete shot his girlfriend through a closed toilet door, by sounds of fighting coming from his home.
The evidence given by Estelle van der Merwe is a further blow to the defence, as along with separate testimony given on Monday, it contradicts the athlete’s statement that it was “unfair and incorrect” to suggest he had a row with Reeva Steenkamp before he killed her.
On the first day of the trial the state’s premier witness, Ms Burger, also claimed she heard a man and a woman shouting before four shots rang out and a woman’s screaming voice then faded away.
Pistorius has been charged with the premeditated murder of his model girlfriend, at his upmarket home in Pretoria, South Africa, in the early hours of February 14th last year, where she had come to spend a romantic evening with him.
However the Paralympic and Olympic athlete denies intentionally killing the 29-year-old, maintaining it was an accident, as he mistook her for an intruder who gained entry to his house.
Ms van der Merwe, who took to the stand just before lunch, lives three houses away from Mr Pistorius at the Sliver Wood estate. She told the court she was kept from sleeping from around 2am by the noise coming from the 27-year-old accused’s house.
“It seemed like somebody was involved in a fight,” she said, “People were talking in loud voices.”
Earlier Mr Pistorius’s legal team continued its attempts to weaken the testimony delivered by Ms Burger on Monday, but the athlete’s neighbour from an adjacent estate stood firm in the face of what was described by the state prosecutor as “relentless badgering”.
Ms Burger stuck to her version of events despite defence lawyer Barry Roux’s aggressive efforts to cast doubt on her credibility, and find contradictions between the statement she gave to the police and her testimony on the stand.