EDITOR’S NOTE: A warning, the story includes details of sexual assault and abuse.
On the weekend of April 19, 2020, Sarah Sherman was watching television as news of Nova Scotia’s mass casualty event made headlines across the country.
In total, 22 people were killed by a gunman, making it the deadliest shooting rampage in modern Canadian history.
“I think in my heart I realized right from the beginning that it was intimate partner violence,” Sherman said.
Sherman knew the signs. She had lived her own nightmare 16 years before when her husband attacked her and their two-year-old daughter when they lived in Nanaimo, B.C.
“I walked into my house,” she recalled about that day in 2004. “I locked my door to be safe, put my stuff down, turned around and he jumped down the stairs with a butcher knife at me.”
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She says her husband, from whom she was already in the process of separating at the time, tied her …