SALT LAKE CITY — Elizabeth Smart remembers the feel of a cold knife at her neck.
As the then-14-year-old lay in bed alongside her younger sister, the man repeated: “Don’t make a sound. Get out of bed and come with me, or I will kill you and your family.”
She was his hostage, he said.
“I was shocked. I thought I was having a nightmare. It was just indescribable fear,” Smart, now 23, told jurors Monday on the first day of testimony in the federal trial of Brian David Mitchell, the man accused of kidnapping her in June 2002.
That night, they fled up the hills above her home, with Smart in her red pajamas and tennis shoes, and the knife to her back.
Her sister rushed to their mother, telling of the kidnapping.
“It was utter terror,” their mother, Lois Smart, testified earlier Monday. “It was the worst feeling, knowing that I didn’t know where my child was. I was helpless.”
Nine months later, motorists spotted Elizabeth Smart walking in a Salt Lake City suburb with Mitchell.
His attorneys did not dispute the facts of the abduction. But during opening statements, they contested the prosecution’s allegation that Mitchell was a calculating person who planned the kidnapping.
Known as a homeless street preacher named “Immanuel,” Mitchell was influenced by a worsening mental illness and religious beliefs that made him think he was doing what God wanted, his attorneys said.
Mitchell was again removed from the courtroom Monday for singing hymns, so he’s watching and listening from a holding cell.
Smart’s mother testified that she and her children ran into Mitchell downtown and that she offered him a job doing handyman work at the family’s home.
Smart said that the morning after the kidnapping, she had been married to Mitchell in a made-up ceremony and raped by him.
Mitchell explained to her that he had been planning the abduction since first meeting the family, she said.
“He said that I was very lucky, that I had been called by God to be his wife,” she said.
Then, she said, she decided to try to survive.
“No matter what it took, I was going to live,” she said.
Mitchell, 57, faces life in prison if he is convicted.
