One Tragic Night

by Mandy Wiener

  ‘Oom Johan, please, please, please come to my house. Please. I shot Reeva. I thought she was an intruder. Please, please, come quick,’ was how Stander would later recall the conversation.

  The voice on the other end of the line was desperate.

  Stander and Oscar first met in May 2009 when the Standers moved into the Silver Woods estate. The athlete arrived at their home in Summerbrook Close, several blocks from his own house, and offered to help them move their furniture in. Over the years they became increasingly friendly – Oscar and Stander’s daughter Carice Viljoen became friends, occasionally meeting for coffee, and Stander looked after Oscar’s dogs when the athlete travelled overseas to train and compete.

  Stander’s wife woke up as he scrambled out of bed and headed for the bedroom door. As he opened it, Carice came out of her bedroom.

  ‘I heard someone screaming for help. Someone’s in trouble,’ she said to her father.

  ‘It must have been Oscar,’ Carice’s mother explained. ‘He called your dad and said he shot Reeva.’

  It was the screams for help and not the phone call to her father that woke Carice. The petite blonde, a legal adviser by profession, had gone to bed at around 8 or 9pm the previous evening, as per usual. It was a hot summer night and she left the sliding door to her balcony open and the room’s blinds pulled all the way up. In the early hours of the morning, she was startled by her dogs barking in her room where they usually sleep. Annoyed and tired, she lay in bed thinking about how she would have to get up and close the sliding door so that her dogs didn’t rush out onto the balcony and wake the neighbours. But she could hear other dogs in the neighbourhood barking too.

  Just as she was about to roll out of bed, Carice heard a person shouting, ‘Help! Help! Help!’ It was a man’s voice, she was sure.

  Carice froze. Her first thought was that she had to close the sliding door because someone could climb up to her balcony and she could be in danger. The neighbours’ dogs began to bark even more and Carice slipped out of bed and went to stand at the sliding door. She dropped the blinds, leaving them tilted very slightly and left the door open a crack. She kept her ear at the opening to hear where the sound came from – she couldn’t tell, but she knew someone needed help.

  Her heart pounding, Carice shut the door and latched it. She closed the blinds and climbed back into bed. The dogs remained restless, and she was afraid. She contemplated what to do next. Her heart was beating furiously and she knew she wouldn’t be able to settle back to sleep. Her dogs were at the foot of her bed and continued to bark madly so she reached for them and brought them close to her in the hope of calming them down. She pulled the covers back over herself.

  As she lay in bed, she suddenly picked up movement in her parents’ bedroom, which she could see into from her own room. She saw the lights going on and that her mother and father were both awake.

  Again, Carice quickly got out of bed and ran to find out what was going on and to tell her parents she had heard someone screaming for help. In the passage, Johan and his daughter decided they needed to get to Oscar’s house as quickly as possible and that she would drive them.

  Carice raced downstairs, pulled her silver Mini Cooper out of the garage and waited for her father in the street. When he finally appeared, she was so anxious she struggled to push in the clutch to change gears.

  She chose the quickest route, driving fast around the corners to Oscar’s house nearly 600 metres away. The trip was so short that Carice later estimated that only three minutes passed between Oscar’s phone call to her father and the time they arrived at his house.

  As Carice pulled up outside the house, she brought the Mini to an abrupt halt in the street and she and her father rushed up the driveway. There were already men standing on the pavement and she asked them what was going on, but they were confused and didn’t know.

  Frank Chiziweni, the man who works at Oscar’s house, was there. So too were the three security guards, Baba, Makgoba and Ndimande. Baba could see on the neighbours’ faces they were worried that something serious had taken place.

  Through the two vertical glass panes alongside the large double wooden front doors, Carice could see the lights on in the house. She could also see that one of the doors had been left slightly open. As she rushed up the narrow tiled pathway, between rectangular ponds on either side, she glimpsed a man making his way down the staircase inside, a woman in his arms, her head and limbs dangling lifelessly.

  Her father and the three security guards trailing behind her saw him too. Carice put her hand on the wooden door and, without much effort, it swung open, revealing something of the nightmare that had unfolded inside.

  From the second Carice walked into the house, she could see that Oscar was distraught. He was walking fast down the second flight of stairs from the landing; Reeva was in his arms, her bloodied head resting on his left forearm.

  Johan Stander noticed the immediate relief on the runner’s face as they stepped through the door, perhaps because help had arrived. Stander could tell that Reeva had suffered a terrible head wound.

  Baba, the security guard, was in shock. He was so flabbergasted he couldn’t quite grasp what he was seeing and only regained ‘consciousness’, as he put it, when he heard Carice shout ‘Oscar!’ According to Baba, the athlete had told him on the phone that everything was fine and yet what he saw now was in direct contrast to what he recalled the man saying to him. He chose to remain outside the front door rather than rush in to help.

  ‘Carice, please, Carice, please, can we just put her in the car and get her to the hospital?’ Oscar begged.

  ‘No, can you please just put her down so we can see what’s wrong?’ she responded.

  Oscar placed Reeva at the foot of the stairs. All Carice could see was blood. Oscar was, however, desperate for them to put Reeva in a car and rush her to hospital.

  ‘He was a young man, walking down the stairs with a lady, with a young woman in his arms and the scene you see, the expression on his face … the expression of sorrow, the expression of pain. He is crying. He is praying. He is asking God to help him. He was torn apart. Broken, desperate, pleading. It is difficult really to describe and his commitment to save the young lady’s life. How he begged her to stay with him. How he begged God to keep her alive,’ Stander later recalled about the events. ‘I saw the truth there that morning. I saw it and I feel it.’

  Oscar put his fingers in Reeva’s mouth to try to keep her airway open so that she could breathe. He was kneeling on one side of Reeva with Carice on the other. He continued to plead with Carice to rush Reeva to the hospital. Stander stepped outside to phone for help and call for an ambulance.

  On the pavement outside, Stander instructed Baba to call the police and paramedics. He also issued instructions to Makgoba and Ndimande. Makgoba was to wait at the gate to escort the police and ambulance to the scene while Ndimande was responsible for keeping the area outside the house clear. Then Stander got on his own phone and tried to call for help.

  Inside the house, the scene was frantic.

  ‘Oscar, we’re phoning the ambulance. Just wait. Let’s see what we can do,’ Carice responded to Oscar’s persistent requests to get Reeva to a hospital. She knew they had to stem the bleeding and that she needed towels to do this.

  Carice ran upstairs to the landing and, in the dark, grabbed a bundle of towels from the linen cupboard, dropping one on the floor in her haste.

  She could hear Oscar praying, pleading with God to save Reeva’s life and also pleading with Reeva. ‘Stay with me, my love … Stay with me,’ he begged.

  Carice scrunched up the towels and pushed them down on the wounds to try to stop the bleeding. She then tried to make a crude tourniquet with one of the towels to stem the flow on Reeva’s right arm. She knew she had to tie it as tight as possible and asked Oscar to help her by holding one side while she pulled the other.

  Then she lifted the elastic of Reeva’s white shorts and, like a sea, a rush of blood
was released. Oscar put pressure down on the towel, trying to dam the flow.

  In the frenzy of trying to stop the bleeding, Carice glanced up at her friend and asked, ‘Oscar, what happened?’

  He looked back at her and said, ‘I thought she was an intruder.’ She chose not to ask him any more questions.

  The towels, however, weren’t stemming the flow so Carice asked Oscar for bags and tape in order to tie the fabric even tighter. At this point he still had his fingers in Reeva’s mouth, trying to help her breathe, so when he stood up to fetch bags and tape, he asked Carice to take over.

  By the time he returned with bags and tape, Oscar was still desperate for the paramedics to arrive and kept asking, ‘Where is the ambulance? Where are they?’ So Carice decided to go outside to her father to find out how far away help was, although she must have known that in reality it was already too late for help.

  As Johan Stipp navigated his Prado around the corner into Bush Willow Crescent, he took in the scene on the pavement outside the modern grey double-storey home. He had no idea who the house belonged to but had gathered that this must be where the screams and shots he and his wife had heard earlier had originated. It was also in this house that he believed he saw a man walking behind a lit bathroom window, from right to left.

  There was a car parked in the street outside the house and he pulled up behind it. A man was leaning against a white BMW in the driveway. The man motioned him nearer and directed him towards the door. A woman was standing in the doorway.

  ‘I’m a doctor. Can I maybe be of assistance? Can I help?’ Dr Stipp said to Johan and Carice.

  Stander instantly suggested Stipp go in to see if he could help. As Stipp made his way inside, he stopped and turned back to Stander. He thought it important to clarify his status, just in case.

  ‘I’m actually a radiologist,’ said Stipp, before walking through the door.

  Back inside the house Carice explained to Oscar, ‘There’s a gentleman, he’s a doctor.’ They were both relieved that someone with medical expertise had arrived.

  Stipp saw a woman lying on her back at the bottom of the staircase. He also noticed a man he didn’t recognise to her left, kneeling over her on the side closest to the kitchen. He had his left hand on her groin and the second and third fingers of his right hand inside her mouth. Stipp bent down next to the woman.

  ‘I shot her. I thought she was a burglar and I shot her,’ was the first thing Oscar said to him as he knelt down.

  Stipp’s medical training kicked in. He tried to open the woman’s airway and look for signs of life. She had no pulse in her neck. He checked her wrist but there was no peripheral pulse either. He was positioned on the side of her badly damaged, broken right arm. The woman showed no signs of breathing and she seemed to be clenching down on Oscar’s fingers as he was trying to open her airway.

  Stipp thought to try what is known in medical circles as a ‘jaw lift manoeuvre’ in order to open her airway but he struggled because her jaw was still clenching down on Oscar’s fingers.

  He could find no signs of life at all. Stipp opened the woman’s right eyelid and could immediately see that the pupil was fixed and dilated and that the cornea was milky. This was the telltale sign for him. It was already drying out so it was obvious that the woman was mortally wounded.

  During Stipp’s attempts to revive Reeva, Oscar was still praying and crying. He prayed to God please to let her live. She could not die. He vowed to dedicate his life and her life to God if she would only live and not die that night.

  Now that the urgency had dissipated, Stipp took time to look over the woman’s body and assess her injuries. He noticed the wound on her right thigh and hip and another on her right upper arm. As he searched further, he noticed the blood in her hair and what appeared to be brain tissue around the right area of her skull. It was obvious to him that there was nothing left for him to do for her.

  Mike Nhlengethwa had dressed and walked over to see what the commotion was about at his neighbour’s home, leaving his wife Rontle in bed. In the street he identified the security vehicle he had watched driving away from the Stipps’ house and he could hear crying coming from inside Oscar’s home.

  He recognised Johan Stander standing in the driveway, greeted him and asked, ‘Johan, is Oscar okay?’

  ‘Hey, Oscar’s okay, but I think it is better you go and check yourself inside,’ was the best response Stander could muster.

  Mike walked towards the front door. Inside he could see Oscar kneeling next to a woman who was covered in blood. Oscar was crying and there was another man with him. Oscar was pleading with the man to help him, repeating, ‘Please, please help.’

  Mike couldn’t handle the scene playing out before him and retreated to the door where Stander was still trying to get hold of emergency services.

  Stipp stood up and walked outside, leaving Oscar kneeling on the floor next to his girlfriend’s body. ‘Ja, it’s very bad,’ said Stipp to Carice. He then reached for his own phone and called the trauma unit at Wilgers Hospital. They instructed him to phone private ambulance service Netcare and he gave the number to Stander.

  At 3:27:06 Stander dialled 082 911. Stipp took the phone and spoke to the dispatcher, describing the injuries. At one point, Carice took the phone and attempted to give the dispatcher directions to the scene.

  In the meantime the security guard, Baba, had made several calls of his own. He had alerted the police at the Boschkop police station and had contacted the control room of his security company. He had also tried to get hold of an ambulance.

  It took less than 20 minutes for the emergency services to arrive at Silver Woods estate. Oscar and Carice stayed at Reeva’s side during the agonising wait, while Stipp periodically went inside to check on her status. Her condition did not change.

  Stander, who had not heard any of the shots or the screams and had simply responded to Oscar’s distressed early-morning call, asked Stipp what had happened. Had he heard anything? Stipp explained he had heard four shots, silence, screams and then another four shots. And while he had initially been baffled as to what had led to the screams and the shots, he now had a better understanding, having witnessed the scene first-hand. He also knew there was nothing more he could do to help the woman lying inside the house.

  When the Netcare ambulance finally pulled up, Carice dashed outside to the pavement, shouting, ‘Just come quick, just come quick!’ The emergency workers offloaded a stretcher but they struggled to get it through the doors to the house.

  Once inside, the paramedics rushed to assess the patient. They lifted her black vest and placed white ECG electrode pads on her chest to check for any signs of life.

  Oscar was in a state. He kept asking the paramedics to do whatever they could to save Reeva’s life. ‘Let’s just step aside so that they can work on her,’ Carice said to Oscar and the two retreated to the kitchen nearby. Emergency officials followed them into the kitchen to make sure Oscar was all right and to check whether they could phone anyone for him.

  At the foot of the staircase, the frenzy had calmed. It had soon become apparent to the paramedics, as it had been to Dr Stipp, that there was nothing more they could do.

  The paramedics asked for Reeva’s ID and Carice explained to Oscar they needed Reeva’s handbag so they could get her driver’s licence or ID book. Oscar said it was upstairs and went off to fetch it while Carice remained downstairs with the medics.

  From the doorway, Stipp realised what was playing out and turned to Stander. ‘Do you know where the gun is?’ he asked. It was obvious to him that Oscar was overwrought and he was concerned that the athlete might hurt himself. Stander had no idea where the firearm was. He went inside and asked his daughter, ‘Where’s Oscar going?’

  Carice noticed that Oscar had disappeared and then she too clicked. She remembered him telling the paramedics that the gun was upstairs in the bathroom. She too thought he might shoot himself. Carice looked at her father, leapt up and raced up the
stairs, calling Oscar’s name. She stood at the top of the stairs, which was still in darkness, shouting, ‘Oscar, please just bring the bag quickly!’

  She could hear him walking across the tiled lounge and then his footsteps fell silent as he stepped onto the carpet in the bedroom.

  ‘Oscar, please just bring the bag,’ she panicked, fearing the worst.

  Moments later, he came back out, handed her the bag and walked down the stairs.

  Reeva Steenkamp was declared dead at 3:50am.

  ‘Please, Oscar, just let me know who I can phone for you. Somebody needs to come,’ Carice urged her neighbour and friend. She could see he was fumbling with his phone. They were standing in the kitchen area and his attempts to make phone calls were punctuated by bouts of vomiting.

  Finally, however, Oscar managed to dial his friend Justin Divaris, but seemed to be making no sense. Carice took the handset from him and explained to Justin what had happened. The same thing happened with his call to Peet van Zyl, his agent. Oscar then called his brother, Carl.

  Mike Nhlengethwa waited for the paramedics to leave before departing himself. He watched as the paramedics carried the stretcher back out and loaded it into the ambulance, empty. It was then that he knew the woman was ‘no more’.

  When he got back home, all he could tell his wife was that he didn’t know what had happened, but somebody had died.

  Johan Stipp hung around for a while, exchanged numbers with Stander and then drove home. He walked back into his bedroom at around 4:20am. Stipp told Annette that a man had killed his girlfriend. She asked him what the man looked like. He explained that he was very muscular and had tattoos on his back but he hadn’t paid much attention because his primary concern was the woman. It was only later that day that Stipp worked out who the shooter was and the scale of what he had witnessed.

  As he pulled up to the Boschkop police station at around 3:30am on Valentine’s Day, Lieutenant-Colonel Schoombie van Rensburg was reflecting on what a busy night it had been for his officers.