Is Oscar Pistorius an innocent man, protecting his house against invisible invaders former lovers cheating girlfriends or is he OJ Simpson?

He holds a lot of records, including worst valentines present ever.

I thought the revised story was that police never suggested that he had fired thinking she was an intruder, and that that was a rumour floated by reporters. It’s a pretty damned unlikely scenario, I think.

Nor do I think he was OJ Simpson, in that I don’t think he planned it. It sounds to me as if he is a violent guy who can’t control his temper. That combined with an arsenal of weapons is a murder waiting to happen.

He knew his girlfriend was fooling around. He puts the pre in premeditated.

I don’t know if I would jump to that conclusion. You can be mad at someone for a long time over infidelity… doesn’t mean you’re going to kill them. It could just have been an impulsive action during an argument, especially since he had guns lying around.

Which of course… is why I think people shouldn’t. If he hadn’t had the guns, he might have done some damage, but it’s more likely she would still be alive.

The tragedy is that if he had no arms this would never have happened…shit, did I just say that out loud?

All her fault for sticking by when she probably had seen the red flags and knew that his disability was a weak spot in his ego.

@ZEPHYRA I don’t see a tilde.

His grandmother, Gertie Pistorius, 89, claimed yesterday that the shooting of Miss Steenkamp was “a mistake anybody can make”.

A post mortem examination on the body of the 29-year-old model revealed that, as well as bullet wounds to the head, arm, hand and hip, she suffered a fractured skull.

Some mistake.

It seems a cricket bat was used to fracture her skull after she was shot.

@flutherother The police have not acknowledged that any of these things are true (the skull and bat are apparently from “unnamed sources close to the police”). I think that, regardless of who is doing the reporting, when there is so much speculation about what happened, perhaps we should just wait and see what the police actually have to say. We all seem to have an unconscious desire for the story to be as sensational as it can possibly be.

That’s not going to happen. This is a sensational case and there is going to be lots of speculation.

Sure. I just wouldn’t get too invested in any one theory, or make definitive statements about “evidence” that is not even confirmable.

@ZEPHYRA Are you really blaming the victim? That’s low.

@glacial Are you the defense attorney?

@zensky Me? Oh, hell no – I think he’s guilty.

You’d make a lousy lawyer. Keep your day job.

<sulks and takes diploma off wall>

Just kidding – I could never be a lawyer. I have no poker face.

I read today that the girlfriend was in her nightdress when police and paramedics arrived on the scene so his story that “he thought someone was breaking into his house” is less believable.

I think it’s going to be a roid rage/temp. insanity plea… just a thought…

The case has stunned South Africa and the wider world. Steenkamp, 29, was a rising star in South Africa as a strikingly beautiful magazine cover girl and reality-TV star. But it is the sudden and tragic turn in Pistorius’ story that has drawn bewilderment and disbelief. Pistorius, 26, was born with no fibula in either of his legs, and both were amputated below the knee before he was 1. Encouraged by a mother who refused to treat him as anything but equal, he used prosthetic limbs to excel at able-bodied sports during high school. Then, as he ran to recover from a rugby injury using carbon-fiber “blades” that mimicked the action of a cheetah, his father realized he was posting world-record Paralympian times.

Pistorius quickly established himself as a world-class Paralympian sprinter but, accustomed to competing in able-bodied sports, fought a long battle against those who claimed his prosthetics gave him an unfair advantage to also take part in the Olympics. Last year, at the Games in London, he emerged as one of the stars, collecting two Paralympic gold medals and two silvers, breaking two world records and one Paralympic record. He also competed in an Olympic final and semi-final.

(MORE: Athletes Who Have Competed in Both the Olympics and Paralympics)

At the time, his sour and ungracious outburst after losing the T44 200m final to Brazilian Alan Fonteles Cardoso Oliveira, complaining that Oliveira’s blades gave him an unfair advantage because they were too long, raised some eyebrows in the athletics world. But it was not enough to dent the almost universal adulation Pistorius drew for his remarkable story of triumph over adversity and the manner in which he was single-handedly overturning the global image of disability. His picture graced billboards and magazine covers across the world. In South Africa, a country that was still living with the white-supremacist apartheid regime where futures were determined by the accident of birth, the story of a boy born disadvantaged who overcame all obstacles to conquer the very world from which his disadvantage should have barred him, made the impossible seem possible. Like few other figures since Nelson Mandela, Pistorius’ inspirational example was able to unite his divided country. Today, as a sobbing Pistorius began to face up to his stunning fall, South Africa — and much of the wider world — finds itself in need of a new hero.

TIME

@zensky Do you think we particularly need a new hero? Why is everyone so shocked when it is revealed that heroes are just ordinary humans who just received a lot of attention for one reason or another? Of course they are as human as everyone else.

I kind of liken the desire to believe in heroes to the desire to believe in a god, and I think that one aspect of this is that it detracts from our appreciation of the ordinary people and things around us – who deserve that appreciation more, because they are real.

No.