Oscar witness grilled for second day

Barry Roux, for Pistorius, repeatedly put it to Charl Johnson that he was trying to cover up the fact that he and his wife had corroborated their testimony to prejudice Pistorius.

“You want to extricate any suggestion that this version was also your wife’s version,” Roux said in the High Court in Pretoria.

“You want that out,” he said, while Pistorius listened intently as his counsel cross-examined his softly spoken neighbour who has testified against him.

“That is what it’s all about,” said Roux, waving a copy of Johnson’s statement across the court room and asking why it was changed several times.

On Wednesday, Roux had requested Johnson’s original notes about what he heard from his home in the Silver Stream estate, which is next to Silver Woods where Pistorius has admitted shooting Steenkamp dead.

Pistorius has pleaded not guilty to premeditated murder as charged by the State, which seeks to prove Steenkamp died during an argument, saying he fired shots because he thought there was an intruder in the house.

Johnson and his wife, Michelle Burger, have both testified in chilling detail that they heard a woman’s cries for help pierce the night, then fade away amid gunfire.

Roux said one statement said he did not count the number of shots that were fired, but his wife recalled “about four or five shots”.

“And that is so removed from this musical talent to count shots. It is not the same,” said Roux, referring to Burger’s testimony that she could remember hearing four bangs because of her musical training.

Grappling for words, Johnson said he wrote it at work where he was probably meant to be doing other work, so he considered that statement a rough guideline.

It was common practice to do drafts of documents, he said.

“It’s the nature of how I do my work,” said Johnson, who is Afrikaans-speaking.

“I try to improve the quality of the work that I write… to use proper English and grammar.”

Roux then asked what he had told investigating officer Captain van Aardt about the shots.

His own version was there were more than what his wife said, and even after Pistorius’s bail hearing where it was said there were four shots, he did not change his version, even though his wife had a different version.

Johnson said that even as more information came forward in Pistorius’s bail application, he did not change any of his notes nor the statement he gave to police.

“I received confirmation during the bail application that it was four shots. But I still told police I wasn’t sure I had heard. I said it was about four and five shots,” he said.

But Roux wanted to know why he dropped the word “about” from a later version in describing what his wife recalled.

And as he did with the wife, Roux insisted that the sounds they took for gunfire were in fact those of Pistorius using a cricket bat to break down the locked toilet door through which he had shot Steenkamp.

He said that he would bring evidence to prove that what Johnson heard “must describe” the breaking down of the toilet door with a cricket bat.”

On Wednesday, professional boxer Kevin Lerena told the court Pistorius had made a friend take the blame after a gun went off in his hand in a packed restaurant in Johannesburg last year.

The State appeared to focus on that episode, which happened a month before Steenkamp died, to portray Pistorius as a man reluctant to take responsibility for his actions.

Prosecutor Gerrie Nel referred to it during Pistorius’s bail hearing last year, telling the court of the accused: “It’s always me. Please protect me.”

– Sapa