Here’s a good
description of the paranoia that is typical among S.A. residents. Well, now I know there is no way I would live in that country by choice. Sounds a lot like the NRA's dream society. I imagine BroDeal et al would love to live in a place like this. Not for me:
On my first night in Johannesburg, I accidentally shut the rape door behind me, trapping myself in the bedroom.
Most middle-class homes in South Africa feature “rape doors” — sliding jail doors that compartmentalize a house so that no intruder can get at you if — and this is the phrase commonly used — “your perimeter is breached.”
It was funny for a minute. Then I realized that since all the windows in the bedroom were barred, I had no way to get out in case of a fire.
We phoned the couple we’d rented our pleasant bungalow from and explained the situation. The owner laughed a long time, and then said he’d be by in the morning to release me.
South Africans are afraid of many things. Fire ranks very low on the list.
This is the atmosphere in which Oscar Pistorius’s credulity stretching explanation of why he shot girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp to death as she cowered in a bathroom will be received. It’s the reason he’s going to get off.
We spent six weeks there covering the 2010 World Cup. There is no sufficient way to explain the paranoia about home security that grips average South Africans, except to say that fear animates much of their lives. The home we rented was typical.
It was surrounded by 10-foot walls. The walls were topped by electric fencing. When you look down a Jo’burg street, it gives the appearance of the frontage of a prison — all high walls, topped by electric fencing (for the well off) or razor wire (for the not-so-well off).
A submarine door accessed the street, but we were warned never to use it. People enter and exit using the garage door, which was solid oak, three inches thick and would not stop once it began coming down. This is to prevent anyone driving in behind you as you enter — an infamous home-invasion tactic.
Inside were the aforementioned rape doors. There was a gun locker (empty) in the master bedroom. Each room had a white button labelled “Panic.”
“What happens if I hit the button?” I asked the landlord as lightly as possible. I presumed it triggered a silent alarm. No, it summons the private-security company that is constantly roaming the neighbourhood in SUVs with blacked-out windows. The country is wracked by violence, but South Africans do not trust the police and would not bother calling them.
“If you hit that button, someone will be here in 90 seconds with a machine gun,” he said. He wasn’t kidding.
Why didn’t Oscar use that button? For that matter, why didn’t Reeva?
Alex, thanks for your contribution. I had no idea that these artificial limbs had to be replaced so often, that they cost so much over time. Wrt the stumps, an article I read quoted OP as saying he would “put on the stumps”, that was why I was under the impression there was something one put over the stumps other than a prosthetic limb. Apparently the writer of the article got that wrong.
Though there has been much talk of how the defense is demolishing the prosecution’s case, I’m again in agreement with Tom that the points the defense made yesterday don’t address what I still regard as the two major weaknesses of their case: that OP was right by the bed when he got his gun (in fact, would have had to be, coming back from the balcony), and therefore could have checked to see if Reeva was still in bed, and that when he screamed at the alleged intruder, Reeva would have responded and told him it was her. Also, if the neighbor who claimed hearing a woman screaming before and after gunshots can be corroborated, that evidence alone would completely demolish Pistorius’s story, though I understand the defense is arguing the neighbor would have been too far away to hear.
Still, as we learned in the Contador case, what matters is the plausibility not of the defense scenario, but of the prosecution's story. If reasonable doubt can be cast on the latter, Pistorius will walk, though he certainly seems guilty. A key question that I would think the defense would raise is, if Reeva feared for her life, why did she take refuge in the bathroom, where she was effectively trapped? Why not leave the bedroom and the house? Without his artificial limbs, it would have been hard for OP to chase her very far. Was Pistorius blocking that escape route? According to the map, the door to the bedroom is right in front of the bed, certainly closer that the bathroom. Maybe OP could have caught her before she unlocked the bedroom door, so she thought her chances were better outrunning him to the bathroom?
Or was it possible that Reeva at that time did not think OP was trying to kill her, and thought if she took temporary refuge in the toilet he would calm down? It now seems there was no shot fired in the bedroom, so what was OP doing there that would compel Reeva to run away from him? Pointing the gun at her? Trying to hit her with the bat? Or was it just angry words at that point?
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