PRETORIA, South Africa — The trial of Oscar Pistorius on murder charges began Monday, with a neighbor of the South African double-amputee track star saying that she heard “bloodcurdling screams” shortly before Mr. Pistorius’s girlfriend was shot and killed.
On a drizzly, gray day in Pretoria, Mr. Pistorius appeared before the court to deny that he had murdered his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, saying in a clear but soft voice that he was not guilty. He also denied several firearms offenses.
On the murder charge, Judge Thokozile Masipa asked if he understood the accusation. “I do, I do, my lady,” Mr. Pistorius replied.
A lawyer reading a statement by Mr. Pistorius said later that the allegation of murder “could not be further from the truth.” He also accused the police of contaminating the crime scene at Mr. Pistorius’s villa in a gated complex here and denied prosecution assertions that Mr. Pistorius and Ms. Steenkamp had argued on the night of her killing.
But the first witness, Michelle Burger, who lived near Mr. Pistorius at the time of the shooting on Feb. 14, 2013, said that she heard a man and a woman screaming before the gunshots.
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| Oscar Pistorius, center, was escorted from court Monday after the first day of his murder trial. |
“It was very traumatic for me,” Ms. Burger said. “You could hear that it was bloodcurdling screams. It leaves you cold. You can’t translate it into words, the anxiousness in her voice and fear.”
Ms. Burger described the sound of the gunfire as a first shot, then a pause and three shots in quick succession.
According to testimony in preliminary hearings, Mr. Pistorius fired four shots through a closed bathroom door. At least three bullets struck Ms. Steenkamp, in the head, arm and hip, vaulting Mr. Pistorius into the notorious ranks of celebrity murder defendants.
Mr. Pistorius’s lead defense counsel, Barry Roux, cross-examined Ms. Burger aggressively, at times sounding impatient, even exasperated, and dwelling on whether she and her husband might have influenced each other’s testimony.
Mr. Roux also questioned whether Ms. Burger was changing or at least adding to her story from an earlier statement and whether the sounds she described as gunshots were actually made by Mr. Pistorius breaking down the bathroom door with a cricket bat. He even raised the issue of whether the high-pitched screams that Ms. Burger said she heard were not a woman’s but his client’s voice rising from anxiety. The witness said repeatedly that she heard two different voices.
Defense lawyers have portrayed Ms. Steenkamp’s death as an accident, but prosecutors have not accepted Mr. Pistorius’s explanation that he believed he was shooting a burglar. South Africa is plagued by violent crime, and home invasions are a common fear.
Earlier, Mr. Pistorius, 27, said in an affidavit that he had been terrified. Vulnerable without his prosthetic legs, he said, he rashly fired through the bathroom door, only to find later that he had killed his girlfriend.
“I approached the bathroom door armed with my firearm so I could defend Reeva and I,” Mr. Pistorius said in the statement read by one of his lawyers on Monday. “I believed Reeva was still in bed.”
There is no death penalty in South Africa, but premeditated murder carries a minimum sentence of 25 years.
As he awaited the start of the trial, Mr. Pistorius, wearing a dark suit and black tie, perched on a cushion on his chair. Photographs showed June Steenkamp, the mother of the victim, weeping. She has told South African reporters that she wants him to look her in the eye.
“Oscar’s Date With Destiny” read a headline in red ink on the front page of The Pretoria News.
After more than a year of preparation, during which Mr. Pistorius has mostly been free on bail, more than a hundred witnesses may be called during the trial, including forensics and ballistics experts.
Since there are no jury trials in South Africa, Judge Masipa will decide his guilt or innocence, assisted by two assessors whom she swore in at the beginning of the hearing. The judge, a former crime reporter, is known locally for handing down long sentences in cases of crimes against women.
The case has been compared to the O. J. Simpson murder trial that transfixed Americans in the 1990s.
Mr. Pistorius and Ms. Steenkamp were a celebrity couple in South Africa. Mr. Pistorius, known as Blade Runner for the flexible, sickle-shaped carbon-fiber prosthetic legs he uses to compete, achieved worldwide fame by challenging able-bodied athletes. Ms. Steenkamp, who was 29 at the time of her death, was a budding reality television star, a model and a law school graduate.
After the killing, however, news reports built a different portrait of Mr. Pistorius — that of a reckless, jealous young man with a passion for guns and a history of mishandling them. Ms. Steenkamp told her mother that they had quarreled a lot, according to some news reports.
Journalists from around the world have gathered to cover the trial, which will be a highly public test for the South African justice system, even more so after a judge ruled last week that much of it would be broadcast live on television. Live images of testimony by Mr. Pistorius and witnesses called by the defense will not be shown, but the audio from all hearings will be broadcast.
The prosecution may have an uphill battle against Mr. Pistorius’s expensive team of lawyers and experts after the lead investigator on the case, Detective Warrant Officer Hilton Botha, resigned last year, acknowledging mistakes in the police work. A magistrate later said he had blundered in gathering evidence.
In the statement read in court, Mr. Pistorius said that the crime scene had been “contaminated, disturbed and tampered with.”
As a sprinter, Mr. Pistorius, who was born without fibulas and had both legs amputated below the knee before he was a year old, won two gold medals and a silver at the 2012 Paralympic Games in London after competing at the Olympics a few weeks earlier, though without winning medals.
The repercussions continue to echo for family and friends of Ms. Steenkamp. Her father, Barry Steenkamp, was reported to have had a stroke recently while reading an article about the case.
