sittingbison said:
the layout makes it look VERY bad for Pistorious Bryant. It was not the case of the bathroom being adjacent to the bedroom as I suspect most people thought, he had to go through the walk in robe, turn around TWO corners then shot diagonally through the water closet not straight through the door which ensured anyone within would certainly get hit.
This is an execution. Plain and simple.
I agree. I will just add that it seems to me that if you shoot at someone through a door, particularly at an angle, it’s not very likely you would kill the person on the first shot. In which case there would be screaming. But Pistorius testified there was none, that even after he stopped firing he didn’t know it was Reeva inside.
Pistorius is trying to have it both ways. On the one hand, he thought whoever was in the toilet was armed and dangerous, justifying shooting to kill without trying to find out the person’s identity. His testimony suggests he panicked. On the other hand, he was sufficiently unafraid of being shot to go right up to the toilet door—clumsily on his stumps, no less, exposing himself to danger if the supposed intruder himself shoots through the door—and carefully line up his shots at a target he can’t see.
As others have pointed out, the safest thing to do—something someone even in a panic should have been able to figure out—would be to stand guard with the gun at the bathroom door until security arrived. The supposed intruder can’t possibly be any threat unless he comes out of the toilet, in which case Pistorius has the clear advantage.
Having said all this, I still think the neighbor's testimony, if it holds up, holds the key. The scenario OP describes defies common sense, but it does not defy any laws of physics or biology. It is improbable, but not impossible. OTOH, if there was a period of several minutes between firing of the first shot and the other shots, and a woman screamed during that period, that is flat-out impossible to reconcile with OP's version. In fact, just the reported gap between shots seems incompatible with Pistorius' story.
Wrt that time gap: I wonder if it’s possible he killed her with a single shot to the head in the bedroom, then dragged or carried her into the toilet and fired several more shots, to make it look like he thought she was an intruder. I guess there were four bullet holes in the door, but is it certain he didn’t fire a fifth shot? I know the prosecution has retracted the claim that a shell was found in the bedroom, but I’m assuming that if he staged it like this, he would have been careful not to leave any evidence of shooting in the bedroom. This scenario, of course, also assumes that smashing the door down was also staged, that it in fact was never locked. I assume when he got through destroying the door there would be no evidence that it was or was not locked.
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