Abduction victim Elizabeth Smart in Denver today recalled waking up in 2002 to find a strange man holding a knife to her throat and threatening her.
As Smart’s abductor, Brian Mitchell, led her away from her Salt Lake City home, Smart thought she’d never see her family again and that she was was going to die.
“I remember thinking, ‘This is it. This is the end.’ ”
Smart, 14 at the time of her kidnapping and now a sophomore at Brigham Young University, was in Denver today to address participants in the 2007 National Amber Alert Conference.
The conference, designed for Amber Alert coordinators and their partners, was sponsored by the U.S. Justice Department.
Elizabeth’s disappearance was the first use of Utah’s Emergency Alert System, known as the Rachel Alert, which was created to quickly broadcast information about an abducted child.
The Rachel Alert, named after a Utah girl abducted and killed in 1982, was adapted from the Amber Alert, named for 9-year-old Amber Hagerman, who was abducted and murdered in Texas in 1996.
Smart was found in March of 2003 in a Salt Lake City suburb after two people called police saying they had seen her there.
She told the Ambert Alert gathering that the work they do continues to be important.
“Children just like me are relying on you to come and save them,” Smart told the group. “I think the Amber Alert does work and it does save lives.”
Kieran Nicholson: 303-954-1822 or knicholson@denverpost.com.
