Prison nurse Charlotte Mashabane has told the North Gauteng High Court she felt threatened when Oscar Pistorius banged a notebook on her office table out of anger.
During cross examination, Mashabane, who was a nurse at the Kgosi Mampuru II prison in Pretoria where Pistorius was incarcerated for a year, told the court she saw Pistorius as a violent person because of three occasions when he became upset with her.
She told the court that one of the confrontations happened during morning rounds when she entered his room: “He became angry, he just shouted, I am disturbing him, and told me to get out”.
She said he then covered his head with his blanket.
Defence lawyer Barry Roux countered that he covered himself as he had been in his underwear, but Mashabane insisted this was not the case.
“He wanted me to get out. That is what he said.”
Earlier on Tuesday she told the court that he “started tantrums again” in February 2015.
After six months of interacting with Pistorius, the head of the hospital section at the Pretoria prison told her she would no longer be dealing with him: “So that this conflict could not continue or become worse”.
Mashabane also described an incident where Pistorius suffered a bruised eye, “because he slipped while lifting weights”.
She disputed his claim that he was assaulted and said she “would have known about it”.
The sister also told the court that Pistorius did not greet her as he did her seniors when he arrived at court on Monday: “But, it didn’t worry me”.
She further testified that Pistorius could not have seen an inmate who hanged himself in ward four.
Pistorius had told psychologist Jonathan Scholtz that the man had been raped and then hanged himself, an incident Scholtz believed contributed to his anxiety and depression.
Roux dismissed her evidence saying: “I get the impression that you want to say something negative because the two of you were not compatible”.
– African News Agency (ANA)
