N.B. woman tells her story, says it’s ‘getting worse’ with intimate partner violence

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.”

She says her husband, from whom she was already in the process of separating at the time, tied her up and sexually assaulted her. Then, he drove to their daughter’s daycare.

“He told me he was going to kill me. And he just wanted to know, was I going to be first or were the kids going to be first?” she said.

Sherman managed to escape and run to a neighbour’s house, where she called for help. When police arrived at the daycare, her husband “threw” their youngest child into their minivan and fled.

There was a high-speed pursuit, Sherman says, and he hit two other cars in the chaos that ensued.

Sherman’s husband died and their child was ejected from the minivan.

“He died instantly. And my child was thrown to the ground because she wasn’t restrained. And she lost about two litres of blood, which when you’re under 20 pounds is a lot of blood,” she said.

The collision also killed a four-year-old boy who had been in one of the other vehicles and seriously injured two others.

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Sherman says the gravity of what happened that day has affected her greatly. She knows many wonder why she didn’t leave her husband despite so many previous incidents of violence. She also realizes that’s a question many survivors of intimate partner violence are forced to answer.

“Why didn’t I leave? Because I knew he was going to kill me. And that’s exactly what happened is he tried to kill me. He was there to kill me and my children that day,” she said.

“We diverted it, but people did die that day, and that’s something I have to live with forever.”

Sherman says it’s important for women and the public in general to understand how these relationships evolve — and how to recognize the signs.

She met her husband in 1986 and describes him as a charming man who took her dancing and showered her with gifts and compliments.

“He took me out and he paid attention to me. And he came back. And that hadn’t happened really much before,” she said.

She was 20 at the time and he was eight years older.

The first time he hit her was mere months into their relationship.

“I just thought I did something wrong, and I needed to fix myself,” she said. “By then, I felt stuck. I felt like I had been there so long, that how could I leave? Who was going to believe me?”

Sherman says even when she did get police involved and left him, he stalked her.

“I would hear footsteps on the roof of my house and I would look up, and he was through the skylight looking down at me.”

It came to a point where she was fearful of calling police for help because she felt it would only exacerbate the violence.

“I knew he would kill me because he had told me that for a long time. And women in our city — three women had recently been murdered in the last couple of years by their estranged spouses, some in front of their children — so this was a very real threat to me.”

In the years since her former husband’s death, Sherman has dedicated her efforts to helping others.

She moved to New Brunswick 15 years ago, has remarried, and began a charity called We’re Here For You Canada. Her group provides support to hospital patients receiving treatment for intimate partner violence.

“If I can help one person feel less awful, or understand what it is, they’ll get help,” she said.

‘Things are getting worse’

Yet over 20 years after her attack, intimate partner violence cases have only grown across the country.

Between 2011 and 2021, police across Canada reported 1,125 gender-related homicides of women and girls. According to the Statistics Canada numbers, two-thirds of those homicides were committed by an intimate partner.

The data also showed police-reported family violence and intimate-partner violence rose by 19 per cent from 2014 to 2022.

Statistics from 2023 show New Brunswick had the highest rate of police-reported intimate partner violence in Atlantic Canada. New Brunswick reported a rate of 449 per 100,000 population, while Nova Scotia reported 338, Prince Edward Island reported 288 and Newfoundland reported 420. The national rate was 354 per 100,000.

Just this week, a 31-year-old man from Musquash, N.B. was charged with manslaughter and indignity to a dead body in connection to the death of a 26-year-old woman. RCMP confirmed the case is being investigated as intimate partner violence.

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In Nova Scotia, the provincial government declared it an epidemic in 2024. However, the province has seen a disturbing spike in the number of deaths in recent months. Since October 2024, seven women and the father of one victim have been killed by their intimate partners.

And it turns out Sherman’s instincts were right on that spring day in 2020.

The Nova Scotia Mass Casualty Commission would later find that the violence, which began in Portapique, N.S., was indeed rooted in intimate partner violence. The 2023 inquiry into the murders issued 130 recommendations aimed at preventing a similar tragedy, including more than a dozen that called on governments to do more to end gender-based violence.

The commission called on Ottawa to appoint an independent gender-based violence commissioner, but two years later, no action has been taken on that key recommendation.

“Things are getting worse and they’re not getting better, and they should have gotten better by now,” said Sherman, who has joined the chorus of advocates calling on New Brunswick to also declare an epidemic.

For her part, Sherman says she’s working to change the conversation surrounding intimate partner violence and the terms used.

Instead of asking “Why didn’t she leave?” she says we should really instinctively be asking “Why didn’t he stop?”

And she has a message for people who are experiencing violence.

“You’re not alone.”

— with a file from The Canadian Press 

Anyone experiencing intimate partner violence can call 911 in the case of an emergency. Support is available in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick by dialling 211.

In Nova Scotia, the provincial toll-free line is 1-855-225-0220, or Nova Scotia 211 online. You can access support anonymously.