Eight years after shooting his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp dead, Oscar Pistorius is eligible for parole. But there are two people he must meet with first.
At 4am on Valentine’s Day, 2013, Detective Hilton Botha was awakened by a phone call. Moments later, the 24-year veteran of the South African Police Service turned to his wife and said: “Oscar’s shot his girlfriend.”
“Oscar”, was, of course, South African “Blade Runner” Oscar Pistorius, who overcame double amputation as an infant to compete against able-bodied runners in the 2012 London Olympics.
The aforementioned “girlfriend” was his partner of three months, 29-year-old model and reality TV-star Reeva Steenkamp, who the then-26-year-old shot dead when he fired four times through the door of the toilet next to his bedroom in the early hours of February 14, claiming he’d mistaken her for a burglar.
Pistorius was subsequently found guilty of manslaughter in 2014 — after a televised trial and numerous appeals that fixated South Africans and generated international headlines — and sentenced to six years in prison. The conviction was later upgraded to murder, with a 13-year and five-month term.
Eight years later, and halfway through his sentence, the 34-year-old is now eligible for parole.
But there are two people he must meet with before he can be freed: June and Barry Steenkamp, the parents of his slain girlfriend.
On Tuesday, the family’s lawyer Tania Koen said they were initially shocked when first contacted by prison services about Pistorius’ potential parole.
The Correctional Services department was due to hold preliminary talks with Steenkamp’s parents, but the meeting was postponed and has yet to be rescheduled.
“But over that shock, they were distraught, especially after the department cancelled the meeting. That was a double blow,” Ms Koen said.
Before the parole process can begin, the Correctional Services department needs to facilitate a dialogue between the victim’s family and the offender.
Pistorius must “acknowledge and take responsibility for [his] actions” and there needs to be an “opportunity for parties to reconcile or an apology”, the South African department said.
Speaking to national television network SABC, Ms Koen said the Steenkamps “would like to participate in the victim-offender dialogue”.
“June has always said she has forgiven Oscar, however that doesn’t mean he mustn’t pay for what he has done,” she added.
“Barry battles with that a bit, but that is something he will have to voice at the appropriate time. The wound, even though so much time has passed, is still very raw.”
The family has previously said they want to confront Pistorius face-to-face before he is considered for early release from prison.
“There is the issue of victim-offender dialogue that needs to take place before his profile can be taken to the parole board,” prisons spokesman Singabakho Nxumalo told AFP.
“It’s quite a sensitive and emotional process.”
Ms Koen said the parole board had been due to discuss Pistorius’ release in late October, but “because certain requirements were not met” the process was halted. It’s unclear when it will resume.
‘I would have attempted to stop the relationship’
After dating a “string of blondes”, Pistorius met Steenkamp on November 4, 2012 at a track day at Kyalami Race track, and according to the event‘s host, Justin Divaris, “it was apparent that Oscar and Reeva were immediately attracted to one another”.
Pistorius told Divaris, the latter said in an affidavit, that he and Steenkamp had “hit it off” and went on to pursue her “ferociously”, friends and family told Vanity Fair in 2013.
“They looked so much in love, and everybody was going on and on about what a great couple they made,” Heat editor Andre Neveling recalled at the time.
“Everybody thought this is ‘the real deal’.”
But there were warning signs from the start — with Steenkamp’s friends warning her that Pistorius’ name was “not good around people on the street”. In messages to Pistorius, Steenkamp wrote that she was “scared” of him “sometimes and how u snap at me and of how you will react to me”.
She wrote she felt “attacked” by the person she “deserved protection from”.
In a 2014 interview with HELLO! magazine, Barry said he wished he could have intervened and persuaded his daughter to end her brief relationship.
“If I’d known what I know now, I would have attempted to stop the relationship. Reeve wouldn’t have liked me for attempting to interfere, but as it turned out she would have thanked me in the end,” he said.
June, meanwhile, spoke to Pistorius just once during the time he was dating her daughter: over the phone, a few days before Steenkamp was murdered, when she called her mother from the passenger seat of her boyfriend’s car, “terrified” because he was driving too fast.
“I could never have imagined that not long afterwards, my beautiful 29-year-old daughter would suffer a painful and horrible death at his hands,” June wrote in a piece for The Telegraph last year, slamming a BBC series that focused on the athlete’s life and reduced Steenkamp “to an anonymous victim”.
“Nor could I have foreseen that years later, the devastation Pistorius caused would be compounded time and again by his lack of genuine remorse, and the way his achievements as a Paralympian sprinter would continue to be glorified while Reeva was reduced to an anonymous victim.”
June wrote she had “nothing to say to him until he is prepared to speak candidly”, deeming Pistorius “a man who, for all his public show of tears in the witness stand at his trial, has never shown enough respect for my daughter’s memory to admit to murdering her in cold blood”.
Originally published as One thing that could see Oscar Pistorius freed
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