Third Pistorius witness testifies

“We were under the impression that someone had been attacked in that house,” Charl Johnson told the court.

“My thinking was what happened to them, the same could happen to us.”

Questioned by prosecutor Gerrie Nel, he said: “I lay awake thinking how I could improve the security to our house.”

Johnson and his wife Michelle live in a complex next to Silver Woods Country Estate in Pretoria, where Pistorius shot dead his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp last year.

He and his wife were convinced they heard from the direction of the Pistorius house a woman screaming when her husband was shot in a robbery.

He told the court he had heard a woman and a man screaming and shots.

He and his wife, who was the first witness in the case, had thought it was a house robbery underway when he phoned security to get help.

Later on the same morning, he fetched a tape measure to measure their sliding door and when he got into the office at 6am he searched security costs on the web.

On his way out of the estate, he had asked at the boom gate if the security knew anything about the night before and the guard could only say “something” had happened.

– Sapa