Oscar Pistorius, listens to cross questioning in court. Photo / AP
On the evidence to date, Oscar Pistorius' version of events does not match what his neighbours think they heard. But what his neighbours heard doesn't match several facts of the case.
Under intense questioning from Pistorius' terrifying defence counsel Barry Roux, Pistorius' neighbours, Dr Michelle Burger, an academic, and her
husband Charl Johnson, an IT worker, would not shift one iota from their story. They said they were awakened in the night by the sound of a woman's "blood-curdling screams", the sound of a man screaming for help, then the sound of gunfire and more screams from a woman.
Why would a man scream for help before the shots had been fired? Burger contested it was perhaps "a mockery". Pistorius covered his ears while his counsel pointedly stated that the medical evidence shows head injuries to Steenkamp so extensive she would have had "no thought process, no cognitive function" and yet the neighbour claims to have heard her screams, from behind a locked toilet door, 177m away.
Could they have slept through the gunfire? Could the woman's screams in fact have been Oscar's "high-pitched screams"? At one point Roux suggested we will hear from an expert witness over the matter of Pistorius's woman-like screams. Could the gunshot they thought they heard have been Pistorius breaking down the door with a cricket bat? "I know what gunshot sounds like," Burger said. "What I heard was gunshot."
