Former Kamloops resident Sarah Sherman is pictured in a documentary called "Behind Closed Doors".
Image Credit: SUBMITTED/ Robert Gow
May 28, 2025 - 6:00 AM
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Twenty years ago, former Kamloops resident Sarah Sherman barely escaped with her life at the violent hands of her former husband Jeff Bethell in her Nanaimo home.
It was the final assault after several years of marriage fraught with Bethell’s increasingly violent outbursts and attempts to control her.
“It was slow and insidious, the grooming and violence didn’t happen right away or all the time,” Sherman said. “He was my best friend, we had great times together but I just didn’t know when he’d flip.”
Sherman filed for a divorce, but Bethell kept returning to stare at her through the windows until he was arrested and put under a restraining order.
On Nov. 8, 2004 Sherman walked into her Nanaimo house and Bethell jumped out from the top of the stairs with a butcher knife. He physically and sexually assaulted her for hours before tying her up and leaving to pick up one of the eldest of their two children from school with a plan to kill all of them, including himself.
Sherman freed herself and called the police. By then Bethell had picked up the child and after seeing police driving behind him, drove head on into another vehicle. Bethell was killed and the child was taken to BC Children’s Hospital with critical injuries. The second vehicle in the crash had a child who was killed and a driver left needing major rehabilitation. A third vehicle involved left one permanently injured.
Sherman ended up in the hospital undergoing a lengthy forensic examination, a traumatic experience that later kickstarted her fight to bring comfort to survivors and awareness of domestic violence.
“Everything was happening, my youngest was critically injured and flown to hospital and they didn’t tell me (Bethell) had died on impact. I thought I need him to go to jail and stay in jail, I was terrified.
“The examination took hours and when it was finished, they didn’t have anything for me,” she said. “I’d walked in there with two pieces of clothing, I had no bra on, I was still nursing at the time. I felt worse than when I walked in there.”
Sherman was handed paper underwear, paper shoes and a neon pink track suit from the hospital’s lost and found to wear to the police station to fill out a report.
“You just want to be invisible, you don’t want people to see you or know what you went through, but I was given this neon suit,” she said. “I had nothing to freshen up with and hadn’t eaten for a long time.”
Just over three years ago, Sherman and a dedicated team of volunteers started We’re Here For You Canada a charity that provides hospitalized survivors of family violence and sexual assault with comfort kits, filled with everything she said she wished she had been given on that traumatic day.
“I thought of all the things that were missing for me that would’ve made it a little less awful,” she said. “I wanted to fill those gaps for people where they have some dignity and respect. They can clean up, put on clean clothes, get a meal and decide what they’re going to do next.”
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The kits include gift cards for food and gas, toiletries, personal care items, clothes and information on available resources. They are packed in reusable grocery bags that are more discrete than hospital bags.
“There are notebooks and pens so they can write stuff down because in that situation your brain is wrecked,” Sherman said. “Nurses tell me when people see the items, they see a little bit of hope on that person’s face, maybe knowing people have put the kit together because they care and want them to have respect and dignity.”
The comfort kits are available at major hospitals and sexual assault centres in New Brunswick where Sherman now lives, as well as 13 locations on Vancouver Island.
She aims to bring comfort kits to the BC interior, starting with Kamloops, where she lived in the 1990s and were she started her family and still has friends.
“My child was born in Kamloops, I worked in social services there and I care about the community,” she said. “It’s a slow roll out, I don’t want to start serving a community and not be able to continue. We try to get started in an area and once we launch, I can apply for funding to sustain it and I’ll need volunteers.”
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Sherman bravely shared her story in a recently released CBC documentary called Behind Closed Doors by Canadian director and producer Robert Gow and Canadian producer Robyn Abbott.
The documentary chronicles Sherman’s marriage, Bethell’s mental health decline and increasingly violent behaviour, the day of the final assault and the impact of her charity.
“People are reaching out saying ‘I felt like I was alone, I felt I was the only person going through this,’” Sherman said. “By talking about it and raising awareness, we’re trying to take the shame and guilt off the survivor and put it onto the perpetrator.”
NOTE TO READERS: If you find yourself in need of support please contact one of these organizations. Help is available 24 hours a day at each of these phone numbers.
VictimLinkBC: 1-800-563-0808
Vancouver Rape Relief crisis line: 604-872-8212
Kamloops Sexual Assault Counselling Centre crisis line: 1-888-974-7278
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