EPA Oscar Pistorius attends a court hearing at the Pretoria magistrates court, South Africa, Feb. 15, 2013. 
 
 Updated: Feb. 15, 2013 at 8:00 a.m. EST 
 
 South African prosecutors on Friday formally charged “Blade Runner” Oscar Pistorius with shooting and killing his model girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, in the early hours of Valentine’s Day. At Pretoria Magistrates Court, prosecutors told chief magistrate Desmond Nair they would argue that Pistorius committed “premeditated murder” on Feb. 14 at his home in the South African capital. In the dock, Pistorius, dressed in a dark gray suit and blue shirt, cried silently, bent over and buried his head in his hands when he was formally charged with one count of murder. From behind, his father Henke, brother Carl and sister Aimee leaned forward to try to comfort him. Pistorius was, in the words of his defense lawyer, in an “extremely traumatized state of mind.” Nair postponed the defense’s application for bail until Tuesday. Pistorius will be held in police custody until then. 
 
 (PHOTOS: Oscar Pistorius On and Off the Track) 
 
 Police have said that Steenkamp was shot in the head and the hand. Local media reports suggested Friday that the police had been called to Pistorius’ home at the Silver Woods secure housing estate in Pretoria just past midnight after neighbors reported hearing a loud argument. They were then called back a second time two hours later, around 3:00 a.m., after the shooting. The Afrikaans newspaper Die Beeld reported Steenkamp had been shot four times through a bathroom door and had been hit in the hand, the pelvis, the chest and the head. On Thursday a police spokeswoman discounted initial media reports that Pistorius shot Steenkamp accidentally, thinking she was an intruder, and added that officers were investigating “previous allegations of a domestic nature” at Pistorius’ home. 
 
 (MORE: What to Know About Oscar Pistorius’ Girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp) 
 
 Pistorius’ family and his management released a statement Friday calling into question the charge that he murdered Steenkamp. Issued from London, the statement read, “The alleged murder is disputed in the strongest terms,” and noted that Pistorius “would like to send his deepest sympathies to the family of Reeva.” 
 
 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. 
 
 PHOTOS: Oscar Pistorius’s Historic Race ||||| Prosecutors say they will pursue a premeditated murder charge against Oscar Pistorius as the Paralympic superstar openly wept in court Friday after being charged with shooting his girlfriend to death. 
 
 In this photo taken Thursday Feb. 14, 2013 a police officer holds a gun that was allegedly used in the shooting of Reeva Steenkamp, the girlfriend of Olympian athlete Oscar Pistorius, at the Boschkop... (Associated Press) 
 
 Oscar Pistorius, centre, is led from the Boschkop police station east of Pretoria, en route to court, Friday Feb. 15, 2012. Oscar Pistorius arrived at a courthouse Friday, for his bail hearing in the... (Associated Press) 
 
 Pistorius was formally charged at Pretoria Magistrate's Court with one count of murder. 
 
 Reeva Steenkamp, a model and budding reality TV show participant, was shot and killed at Pistorius' upmarket home in an eastern suburb of the South African capital in the predawn hours of Thursday, sending the country reeling. 
 
 Pistorius stood with his face in his hands as he broke down in tears on his first court appearance. 
 
 The magistrate delayed Pistorius' bail hearing until next Tuesday and Wednesday and ruled that the 26-year-old Pistorius would be held at a Pretoria police station until then.
– Covering his face, South African runner Oscar Pistorius arrived at a Pretoria court today via police car, the BBC reports. After being charged with one count of murder, he was in tears; prosecutors are making a case that the crime was premeditated, the AP notes. The court pushed Pistorius' bail hearing to next week in the case that found his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, dead in his home. In the meantime, Pistorius will stay in the police station. Pistorius is doing "very well, obviously emotional, but fine," his lawyer says. Meanwhile, a forensic team is set to continue an investigation of his house as more details emerge in the case. After reports yesterday suggested Pistorious mistook Steenkamp for an intruder, local media is now suggesting he shot her four times through the bathroom door, Sky News reports. Time cites local reports suggesting that police were first called to the Pistorius home shortly after midnight by neighbors who heard a loud argument. Then they were called back after the shooting, just two hours later.