Cape Town - Triple murder accused Henri van Breda has told the Western Cape High Court he wasn't interested in explaining himself to the doctor who examined him after a brutal attack on his family in January 2015.
During cross-examination on Monday, Van Breda said he hadn't told Dr Michelle van Zyl that he had lost consciousness for over two hours after the vicious axe attacks on his family that left his parents and brother dead, and his sister, Marli, fighting for her life.
Van Breda claims he fell down the stairs after throwing the axe, used in the murders, at the intruder. He explained that once the intruder or intruders had fled, he tried to call his girlfriend but the call when straight to voicemail. He then returned upstairs and lost consciousness, perhaps from the "shock" of seeing his dead mother and critically injured sister.
Two hours and forty minutes passed before he tried to contact emergency services, yet he failed to tell the doctor that information when he was examined at Vergelegen Medi-Clinic on the evening of January 27.
Senior prosecutor Susan Galloway said: "This event of you losing consciousness randomly, is it not to address the 2hrs 40minutes lost in the timeline?"
Van Breda insisted that was not the case.
Galloway again raised discrepancies between his plea explanation and initial police statement. "In your plea explanation you said you heard Rudi making gurgling sounds, and you said he was moving violently. In the statement you make only one reference to Rudi saying he was just lying there while being attacked."
She put it to him that his later claim that his brother had been thrashing around on the bed, was in fact to fit in with blood spatter expert Captain Marius Joubert's theory that Rudi had been "handled" on the scene as his body was not found on the bed, but was on the floor next to the bathroom door.
Van Breda told the court the police had "misrepresented" his words.
Galloway also questioned why he had not simply called emergency numbers that were on the fridge, and instead Google searched them.
"I felt I would be doing more by finding the number myself," he said.
Galloway further said he could have called neighbour Stephanie Op't Hof and that she could have assisted by placing towels on his mother or Marli's head to stem the bleeding. But Van Breda insisted he felt it would be better to "speak directly to the people who were going to help".
He also felt contacting security officers at the security estate where they lived would have been "an indirect way of getting help".
"In your version, you were still of the view that Marli and Rudi were alive. You saw Marli move and Rudi making sounds. Why didn't you tell the emergency operator that two members of your family were still alive? You take the trouble of saying that your sister was still alive, but make no mention of your brother. Why didn't you say two of them are still alive?" Galloway asked.
Van Breda said he couldn't be sure but said he had asked for more than one ambulance.
"I thought I was doing the most I could."
He told the court: "If I thought I could have helped them, I would have done so."
Van Breda appeared to become emotional at that point and asked the court for a break to compose himself.