Pistorius as mysterious as the shooting tragedy

It was Oscar Pistorius. On Feb. 14, he was flanked by officers as he left a police station. Hours earlier, he would been charged with killing his girlfriend. Prosecutors painted him as a man prone to anger and violence, though he had no prior criminal record. Oscar shot Steenkamp by mistake, thinking she was a nighttime intruder, while prosecutors allege he intentionally shot her after the couple argued. Who is Oscar Pistorius? I thought I had some idea, and in a sense, so did the millions around the world who cheered the double-amputee athlete as a symbol of determination over adversity. Now he is as much of a mystery as whatever happened in his home in the early hours of Valentine's Day. Weeks before his debut at the Olympics, he stopped an interview with me to talk to a little girl who walked up to give him a strawberry from the gardens of the rural hotel at his training base in Gemona, in northern Italy. Now the world knows Pistorius owns a 9 mm Parabellum pistol, licensed for self-defense, and that he applied for licenses to own six more guns listed for his private collection weeks before the shooting death of Steenkamp. His relationships with women have been spread over the gossip pages in South Africa. During his Olympic preparations in Italy, Pistorius pulled out his cellphone to show pictures of his bleeding leg stumps, rubbed raw from the friction of pounding around the track on his blades. It was around the time when people were again questioning whether he should be allowed to run in the 400 meters against able-bodied athletes. It was rare for Pistorius to show images of his amputated limbs, but he grinned and shrugged. It took a long time for him to get used to people filming and taking photographs of him putting on his carbon-fiber blades. He used to ask people not to film him without his prosthetics. When he finished a race at the South African national championships last year, he quickly disappeared to a secluded part of the track to swap his blades for artificial legs, complete with sponsored sneakers that his agent was holding for him. It was his regular post-race routine. It always seemed people wanted more of his time than he could give.