Pistorius Trial: Witness Timelines 9 (Carice Stander)

Carice Stander

House at 212 Summerbrooke Close, 531 meters from Pistorius’ house.

Her bedroom balcony gave straight view onto the bathroom side of his house.

Woke up from her dog barking in her bedroom.  She heard other dogs in the neighborhood area also barking; her sliding door was open onto the balcony and her blinds were pulled all the way up, because it was hot.

She was lying in bed thinking that her dogs would run out onto the balcony and bother the neighbors, so she thought she had better get up and close the sliding doors.  Just as she was about to get up and do that, she heard somebody shouting  “help, help, help”.

She lay frozen in her bed, the dogs barked even more.  She thought “I need to get up”.  She got up to close her sliding door, scared that someone would climb up to her balcony and come into the bedroom.  She stood by the sliding door and let down the blinds, then listened at the partly open door. So she closed the sliding door and latched it and closed the blinds, then got into bed, very frightened.  Her dogs were still very restless.   She didn’t know what to do.  The dogs were very agitated.  She tried to calm them down.  She lay down and pulled the covers over herself but was very scared.  She didn’t know how to help the person who needed help.  She was thinking “Oh my gosh, how am I going to sleep now?  How does one fall back to sleep after hearing something like that?”  But she ended up settling back in.

Then she saw a commotion in her parents room and saw that the light went on and they were awake.  She went in and told them that she had heard the shouts for help. They told her that Oscar had phoned her father.

There is considerably more to her testimony as she was the first on the scene, but we’re stopping at this point since our interest is in the timeline.  There is one fixed point on this timeline, which is that the call from Pistorius to Stander was made at 3:19:50.