I apologize for the lengthy post.
deefstes wroteBy his own admission he fired four shots into a locked bathroom door with the intention to kill whoever was on the other side. That is murder.
I am not sure about SA Deefstes but "murder" requires some premeditation. They will likely never be able to prove this here. Well......since there is no jury I don't know...... but by the letter of the law, any evidence they were fighting etc will have to be way more than circumstantial. If nobody witnessed him say "I am going to kill you Reeva" how do they prove this, beyond reasonable doubt?
He should go down for some form of manslaughter.
There is a strange thing that can happen to a shooter under stress. It's called Tachypsychia or the tache psyche effect. Time can slow down, heart rate can bump to over 200bpm, you can get tunnel vision and auditory exclusion and lose your fine motor skills. It is not uncommon for people in a shooting to think they only fired two rounds when they emptied a magazine. I mean really believe they only fired two.
So he may have meant to only fire a single shot but under the stress of the situation pressed the trigger 4 times.
What if.............notice, what
if.........obviously we can only surmise..........but there are only two real scenario's here.
First. What
if they had a moerse fight, he gets physical somewhat with her....she threatens him or swings at him, maybe even klaps him with his cricket bat hard enough to enrage him.....she runs and locks herself in the toilet and sits down on the can to sob etc like girls do not thinking he will get worse. Meanwhile he retrieves his pistol and pissed off as hell, out of his sane mind with anger he plans to fire a shot at the lock to open the door but shoots 4 wild shots under the effect of blind rage, and hits her 3 times. Now he smashes out the rest of the door and gets in only to see she is wounded from the bullets and he starts coming to his senses, realizes what he has done....... he tries to help but she dies so he starts fabricating his story. Way easy to blame it on some perceived intruder....what with all the crime in SA.
Second. What
if he did go to the balcony and shut the open door. He does hear a noise in the bathroom. He panics.....grabs his gun and
does not pause to wake Reeva and let her know, cup his hand over her mouth and whisper that someone is in the house as she comes to and that she should call 911 and go on the balcony.......then (kinda against all common sense and training ) he goes to take a look, taking his gun. He does in fact hear a noise in the bathroom. By now tachypsychia has fully kicked in......he thinks Reeva is sleeping, it must be killers......he yells out at them (but does not hear Reeva saying "it's just me")......then, in a distorted sense of time and space he is now convinced men are in the bathroom who want to kill everyone in the house and he fully panics..... fires 4 shots through the door. Now he hears Reeva moaning and realizes he just shot her.......
Which scenario do I pick....? I feel it's #1 or some version of it.......but I obviously do not know.......only Pistorius does. Murder..... it will never be proven. He will go down for some version of #2. Some form of Manslaughter , Voluntary or Involuntary Manslaughter, Culpable Homicide maybe, Reckless Homicide etc etc. He'll get time I am sure........in a prison for people like him......celebrities, rich folks etc......not general population I am sure. He will get a sentence that likely will not reflect the seriousness of what he did and of course, it will not bring Reeva back or fill the hole in the hearts of her loved one's. Yeah.....her pops is shattered. Very sad.
I hope people learn from this big time............ you cannot just shoot through doors......even if you KNOW there is a bad actor behind it. To all intents and purposes that person is now contained and not a serious threat. You are supposed to yell loudly something like....." person in the bathroom, I have a gun and I WILL shoot to kill if you try to come out or attack me. I repeat...I have a loaded gun and I will kill you if you come out. The police have been called and are on their way." You could even back off and yell to them that you have left the room and that you will kill anyone who follows you...... but they are free to leave the way they came and avoid the police.....give them the opportunity to leave your house. Besides.......once you go looking for someone in your house with a gun........you are essentially hunting them. This is legally unwise. It's best to only move through the home to gather your family to one safe room if possible. Not hunt down an intruder to fire on them. What if they were only interested in stealing valuables? You cannot kill in defense of property.
Lookit...............if that HAD been an intruder, he'd still probably get off scott free even though it is horribly wrong to shoot through doors but he could say he saw the guy go in there and he thought he saw a weapon, a gun. The home is one's castle after all. But he didn't. He shot his overnight guest. Different story. A tragic one.
This is going to be his downfall. He shot at someone he could not see and identify. He made no effort to wake and/or warn his "sleeping" girlfriend or even verify she was in bed. He screwed up every step of the way. At the very least he is an incredibly stupid person, not fit to own a firearm. But Reeva..........she paid the ultimate price.
Here in LA......we have to do a written course with tests to qualify for a handgun. Then, before the gun is handed to you they go over in the store all the important stuff. There are books and many good articles on the web. This stuff is common knowledge. I cannot say it enough times......you have to identify the threat. Anyone on this forum who owns a firearm, I highly urge you to buy books on the legality of when you can shoot to kill and the proper and safe handling of firearms.
Here the law says something like.......you can only shoot in defense of yourself or other innocents
when faced with an imminent and otherwise unavoidable threat of death or grave bodily harm.
