Twenty-year-old Zachary Miller started making knives when he was 11. He said hammering the steel was a coping method for him.
"I started playing in the fire and when I'd get angry I'd start beating steel,” said Zachary Miller.
When he was 10, Zachary was abducted by notorious child predator Peter Whitmore. For three days in 2006, Whitmore sexually assaulted Miller and another boy in an abandoned farm house near Whitewood, Sask.
“We believed him,” said Lyle Miller, Zachary’s father. “You have to have faith in people. We had no idea what he was.”
August 1 marked the 10th anniversary of when Zachary was returned home.
“The nightmare isn't the three days that you went through. The nightmare is actually the life you live after it, reliving every moment of that," said Zachary.
"You try and go back to what you were before, that's just about impossible. You need to take a lot of time to heal up," said Lyle.
In 2008, after two years of trying to find a new normal, the Canadian Centre for Child Protection stepped into the Zachary's life and started to help the family heal.
The family is now part of the "kids in the know" awareness campaign for school age children.
"You have power in your voice. Speak out, someone will listen and someone will help,” said Zachary. “You have more power in your voice than you can imagine, because once you speak out they become powerless."
When Miller was 17 years old he went to the Ministry of Justice to have his name released from a publication ban so he could publicly share his story. He wanted to help other children and families who suffered his same fate. In December of 2015, the courts granted his request.
Zachary spends his Saturdays selling his knives at the Regina Farmer's Market. Making knives started out as a coping method but now it’s a labour of love.
“There’s no way to see what I would have looked like without going through this,” said Zachary. “All I know is that it's broke our family down but we've come back even stronger now and we're ready to make a difference."
