Oscar loved guns – friend

Darren Fresco corroborated earlier testimony that a seething Pistorius had fired a shot through the sunroof of a car in 2012 after they were stopped for speeding.

One of the policeman who pulled them over, saw Pistorius’s firearm lying on the car seat and picked it up. Fresco testified that it enraged Pistorius, who is on trial for shooting dead his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.

“The accused replied ‘you can’t just touch another man’s gun’,” Fresco told the High Court in Pretoria.

After they drove off, Fresco was startled by a gunshot and realised that Pistorius had fired out of the sunroof of the car.

“I apologise My Lady, but I asked him if he was f****** mad,” Fresco told the court when State prosecutor Gerrie Nel asked how he reacted.

Asked how Pistorius responded, he said: “He just laughed, My Lady.”

Under further questioning from Nel, Fresco confirmed that Pistorius had asked him to pass him his Glock pistol while they were having lunch at Tasha’s restaurant in Johannesburg in January last year.

He said he trusted Pistorius “to be competent… because he had a big love for firearms” and passed it to him under the table, with the warning that there was a bullet in the chamber.

Fresco said he saw Pistorius move his shoulder, and assumed that he was securing the firearm, but the next moment a shot rang out, silencing the busy restaurant.

As professional boxer Kevin Lerena testified last week, Fresco said Pistorius promptly asked him to take the blame for the incident because he did not want to attract media attention.

He quoted the Olympic sprinter as asking: “There is too much media hype around me at the moment, please can you take the rap for it?

“Being a friend, I said I would,” he told the court.

Pistorius’s lawyer, Barry Roux, put it to Fresco during cross-examination that his recollection of the conversations with the restaurant owners in which he took responsibility for the shot, were partially at odds with theirs.

He also asked Fresco, who conceded that he consulted lawyers before he made his statement, why his written testimony was silent on Pistorius asking him to take the blame for the restaurant incident.

“I can’t give you a reason for that,” Fresco responded.

Earlier on Tuesday the seasoned advocate had grilled pathologist Gert Saayman, who performed the post mortem on Steenkamp, about his testimony that she appeared to have last eaten some two hours before she died.

As Steenkamp died after 3am on Valentine’s Day last year, this testimony appeared to contradict Pistorius’s submission that the couple went to sleep around ten.

Roux at one point asked for an adjournment to consult scientific literature about gastric emptying, but Saayman expressed confidence that his findings were accurate.

He had, he pointed out earlier, performed or supervised between 10,000 and 15,000 medico-legal post mortem exams during his 30-year career.

Saayman also testified that Steenkamp had about a teaspoon of murky urine in her bladder. He told the court that her bladder would have been empty had she gone to the toilet between 30 minutes to an hour before her death.

Steenkamp was shot dead in a locked toilet cubicle in Pistorius’s luxury townhouse in Pretoria. He admits killing her but contends he believed he was shooting at an intruder hiding in the toilet, when he fired four shots into the door.

He last week pleaded not guilty to premeditated murder.

Neighbours of the disabled sprinter have testified that on the night of the shooting they heard a woman’s screams ring out from the direction of his house.

On Monday, as Saayman gave graphic testimony about Steenkamp’s injuries and pointed out that she was shot with bullets designed to expand on impact and cause maximum damage, Pistorius became violently ill in court.

– Sapa