Reeva’s cousin says killing ‘ruined our whole family’
Reeva Steenkamp’s cousin sobbed while telling of how she first heard on a car radio that Oscar Pistorius had killed her relative.
Kim Martin said she had “hoped to God” that Pistorius was cheating on her cousin – who was his girlfriend – and that the young woman he had shot at his home was not Reeva.
Martin told a Pretoria court at Pistorius’ sentencing hearing: “They hadn’t confirmed the name, they said his girlfriend. I was trying to phone her [Reeva] and she wasn’t answering, and I was screaming at my husband.”
Martin, who said she was close to Steenkamp, went to her mother’s house, where she learned her cousin had been killed by Pistorius.
“The doors opened, and my mother was hysterical, and that’s when I knew it was true,” Martin said. “That was for me the end of the world. Everything was just a blur from then onwards.”
The emotional testimony during Pistorius’ sentencing caused the judge to rule a brief adjournment when Martin began crying. Her testimony described in detail the impact that Steenkamp’s Valentine’s Day killing had on her family.
“We were all, ‘Why, why, why Reeva?'” Martin said, while explaining the killing had “ruined our whole family.”
Steenkamp was shot multiple times by Pistorius through a toilet cubicle door in his home in the predawn hours of February 14, 2013. The Olympic athlete was found guilty of culpable homicide for negligently killing her but acquitted of murder after claiming he mistook Steenkamp for an intruder.
Martin was the first witness called by prosecutors for sentencing and the first relative of Steenkamp to give testimony in the case. Martin said she wanted to be “Reeva’s voice” after Steenkamp’s parents, Barry and June, decided they were too emotional to testify.
As Martin told of the moments she first learned Steenkamp was dead, Pistorius hunched forward in the courtroom and put his hands over his face. Steenkamp’s parents, who have attended much of the trial, appeared to be crying.
Judge Thokozile Masipa will decide Pistorius’ punishment and has a range of options. The judge could order Pistorius to pay a fine and go under house arrest, or she could send him to prison for up to 15 years.
Pistorius’ lawyers have argued for a correctional supervision sentence with periods of house arrest. Social workers testifying for the defence recommended against sending him to prison, partly because of his disability as a double amputee. Prosecutors reject that and insist that Pistorius, 27, should go to jail, saying his negligent actions on the night he shot Steenkamp, 29, have left a “broken family.”
Steenkamp’s mother was on medication after the killing and her father sat in a corner of his house crying, Martin revealed. She said that she is receiving trauma counseling and her children need therapy.
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