PRETORIA, South Africa — Oscar Pistorius fired guns in public in the months before he killed his girlfriend – once out of a car sunroof on a road and once in a crowded restaurant, a onetime friend said at the athlete’s murder trial Tuesday, drawing an aggressive effort from the chief defense lawyer to pick holes in his testimony.

The account by Darren Fresco portrayed Pistorius as a reckless hothead infatuated with firearms and seemingly drifting down a precarious path before he fatally shot Reeva Steenkamp through a closed toilet door at his home before dawn on Feb. 14, 2013.

Fresco’s description of how Pistorius once berated a police officer fit the prosecution’s attempts to cast the double-amputee athlete as prone to flashes of anger and blinded by an inflated sense of entitlement at a time when his public image was that of a clean-cut poster boy for overcoming adversity.

“I said to him, are you (expletive) mad?” Fresco testified after, he said, Pistorius fired his gun out of the sunroof of the car later on the same day that he had the dispute with the police officer. “He just laughed.”

At the same time, the testimony was coming from a man whose own actions were under scrutiny. Judge Thokozile Masipa cautioned Fresco, who was also a friend of Steenkamp, that some questions could incriminate him for offenses including discharge of a firearm in a built-up area. She said he would not be prosecuted if he answered the questions truthfully.

Pistorius, 27, denies shooting the gun in the car. He is on trial for murder in the killing of Steenkamp, and also faces two firearm charges for shooting in public and a third for illegal possession of ammunition.

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Pistorius says he shot Steenkamp by mistake, thinking she was a dangerous intruder. The prosecution says he killed her after an argument.

The athlete’s demeanor in court Tuesday was drastically different from the previous day, when he needed a vomit bucket as he heard a pathologist give graphic details of the injuries he inflicted on his girlfriend when he shot her multiple times.

This time, Pistorius mostly sat with his hands in his lap and often made notes.

Fresco testified that Pistorius’ altercation with a police officer happened in late 2012, when their car was pulled over by traffic police for the second time that day. He said Pistorius was furious with an officer for handling his gun, which he had left on the passenger seat.

“ ‘You can’t just touch another man’s gun,’ ” Pistorius said to the officer, according to Fresco. “He started telling the officer: ‘Now your fingerprints are all over my gun, so if something happens, you are then going to be liable for anything that had happened.’ He was furious about that. Someone else had touched his gun.”


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