Oscar Pistorius' girlfriend told the athlete she was sometimes scared of him and complained about what she described as his short temper and jealousy in the weeks before he killed her, according to phone messages revealed at the Olympian's murder trial today.
"I can't be attacked by outsiders for dating u AND be attacked by you, the one person I deserve protection from," Reeva Steenkamp wrote to Pistorius.
In another message read out loud by police Capt. Francois Moller, Steenkamp said she was sometimes afraid of the athlete: "I'm scared of you sometimes and how you snap at me and how you act at me."
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Moller extracted information from Steenkamp's phone and said he obtained more than a 1,000 exchanges between her and Pistorius on WhatsApp and other phone messaging applications.
Moller said he was given two BlackBerry phones, two iPhones, two iPads and a Mac computer the day after the shooting death of Steenkamp.
Moller said the data on her phone would print to more than 35,000 pages. Of the fraction of exchanges between the couple, Moller said that about 90 per cent were what he called normal and "loving" exchanges.
In earlier testimony today a neighbor testified that she heard gunshots as well as screams from both a man and a woman on the night that the double amputee runner fatally shot Steenkamp.
Anette Stipp's testimony matched some of the evidence given by other witnesses earlier in the trial who said they also heard a woman screaming around the time that Pistorius killed Steenkamp before dawn on Feb. 14, 2013.
According to Pistorius' version of events, he thought Steenkamp was in bed when he fired his pistol. He did not describe any woman screaming.
The defense has countered that the neighbors were actually hearing Pistorius screaming in a high-pitched voice after he shot Steenkamp, a 29-year-old model.
Pistorius has said he shot his girlfriend by mistake through a locked toilet door, thinking that she was an intruder in his home.
