Reeva had “devastating” head wound
Reeva Steenkamp suffered a "devastating" head wound, which would have made it impossible for her to scream, the High Court in Pretoria heard on Thursday.
A member of the African National Congress Womens League wears a picture with the face of the late Reeva Steenkamp while attending Olympic and Paralympic track star Oscar Pistorius’ murder trial at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria, Wednesday, 5 March 2014. Pistorius is on trial for murdering his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp at his suburban Pretoria home on Valentine’s Day last year. He says he mistook her for an intruder. Picture: Siphiwe Sibeko/Pool
“It was a terrible, serious, devastating head wound,” Barry Roux, for Pistorius, told the seventh State witness, radiologist Johan Stipp.
He was making the point that Stipp could not have heard a woman screaming in the early hours of February 14 last year.
“A person with that injury would not have been able to scream,” said Roux.
Stipp’s home, in the Silver Woods Country Estate, Pretoria, is near Pistorius’s. He testified that he woke up around 3am to what sounded like gunshots, then heard a woman screaming and then three more “bangs”.
Prosecutor Gerrie Nel rose and objected to Roux’s phrasing.
He said it could not be stated as a fact that the first shot killed Steenkamp, thus making it impossible for her to scream.
Stipp was the first doctor to see Steenkamp’s body lying in Pistorius’s home.
Pistorius is accused of the murder of Steenkamp. He is also charged with illegal possession of a firearm and ammunition, and two counts of discharging a firearm in public.
He allegedly fired a shot from a Glock pistol under a table at a Johannesburg restaurant in January 2013.
In September 2010 he allegedly shot through the open sunroof of a car with his 9mm pistol while driving with friends in Modderfontein.
– Sapa
