Screams heard from Oscar’s house

“I heard a lady screaming… terrified, terrified screaming,” occupational therapist Annette Stipp testified.

She said she had woken up around 3.02am on February 14 2013, feeling ill and coughing.

While she was lying in bed trying to decide whether she should have water for her throat she heard “something that sounded like three gunshots”.

Her husband woke up. They went to a balcony and saw lights on at a house across the way at the Silver Woods estate.

It sounded like a family murder to them from the woman’s screaming and they were worried there might be children in the house.

Her husband Johan, who had testified earlier, told her there was a man moving to the left hand side of the house, said Stipp.

They tried to phone the flying squad but the number was not working.

By that time their bedside clock radio, which was usually about three to four minutes fast, said 3.17am.

They heard more shots and had been trying a cell number for emergencies.

They called security and when guards came they said security must go to the house where the shots were coming from.

“I could hear the screaming. I also heard a man screaming,” said Stipp.

Stipp does not want video or stills images of herself broadcast or published.

She said she could not make out words during the screaming, but it was definitely a male voice.

“After the second set of shots it just became quiet. There was no more screaming either male or female,” she said.

In the early hours of February 14 last year, Pistorius shot dead his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp.

The sprinter, nicknamed “Blade Runner”, has denied intending to kill Steenkamp, contending that when he fired four shots into a locked bathroom door, he believed there was an intruder in the toilet cubicle.

The paralympic athlete has pleaded not guilty to charges of the premeditated murder of Steenkamp; as well as contraventions of the Firearms Control Act.

His defence Barry Roux SC has submitted that the screams were only of Pistorius seeking help and that Steenkamp would not have been able to scream after being shot in the head.

The firearm contraventions are linked to separate incidents in which Pistorius allegedly fired a pistol under a table at a Johannesburg restaurant in January 2013, and allegedly shot through the open sunroof of a car while driving with friends in Modderfontein in September 2012.

– Sapa