LEGAL TROUBLE: Aimee Pistorius (top right) walks into a police station in Pretoria yesterday a day before brother Oscar (inset, right) was to appear in court for a bail hearing in the murder case of gal pal Reeva Steenkamp (inset, left). (
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One month before he gunned down his girlfriend in his South African manse, Oscar Pistorius nearly shot a pal in the foot in a local cafe, the man said yesterday.
The Olympic runner was checking out a friend’s gun when it went off, just missing Johannesburg boxer Kevin Lerena.
“I got a huge fright because the bullet hit the ground just centimeters from my foot,” Lerena told Beeld newspaper. “Oscar just wanted to look at the gun and it sort of snagged on his pants, releasing the safety catch.
“But it really was a freak accident.”
Cops weren’t called because when cafe manager Jason Loupis went to investigate, “they all denied it,” he said.
The near-miss was revealed just hours before Pistorius, 26 — charged with the premeditated Valentine’s Day murder of model Reeva Steenkamp — was due to appear in a Pretoria court for a two-day bail hearing.
Across the country in Port Elizabeth, Steenkamp’s anguished family said they will bury the vivacious beauty this morning in a private ceremony.
“All we want are answers, answers to why our beautiful daughter had to die like this,” Steenkamp’s weeping mother, June, told the Times of Johannesburg.
The swimsuit model and law graduate, she said, “loved like no one else could love” and was “the most beautiful person who ever lived.”
“Now all of it is gone. Just like that, she is gone.”
Steenkamp, who had been dating the track superstar since November, was shot four times as she cowered behind a locked bathroom door in Pistorius’ luxurious Pretoria bachelor pad just before dawn on Feb. 14.
Police found banned steroids and a blood-covered cricket bat during a search of the Pistorius home, according to published reports.
Cops are investigating whether the double amputee — nicknamed the Blade Runner because of his high-tech, carbon-steel prosthetics — killed Steenkamp in a steroid rage, and whether he may have bashed her skull with the bat before shooting her in the hip, hand, arm and head.