Reeva Steenkamp was less than a month from the grave when she fired off a text to jealous boyfriend Oscar Pistorius.
“I’m scared of u sometimes and how u snap at me and of how you will react to me,” the doomed bikini model wrote after the South African sprinter embarrassed her at a friend’s engagement party.I just want to love and be loved. Be happy and make someone SO happy. Maybe we can’t do that for each other.” Pistorius wrote back and apologized — but blamed her for his “tantrum. I was upset that you just left me after we got food to go talk to guy,” he wrote. “I was standing tight (sic) behind you watching you touch his arm and ignore me.”
Eighteen days later, Steenkamp was dead and Pistorius was accused of gunning her down in his Pretoria pad.
Sitting in the dock, Pistorius’s face reddened and he teared up at one point as the damning texts were read. But mostly he kept his nose in a book.
“I can’t be attacked by outsiders for dating u AND be attacked by you, the one person I deserve protection from,” Steenkamp wrote in one text just a week before she was killed on Valentine’s Day 2013.
Pistorius, 27, insists he accidentally killed Steenkamp when he fired four shots through a bathroom door believing an intruder was hiding there.Prosecutors said Pistorius — a double-amputee with a short fuse and a firearms fetish — chased Steenkamp to the bathroom and began blasting when she wouldn’t come out.The texts were among the 1,000 exchanges between Steenkamp and Pistorius that police found on their phones and computers.