The teenage boy at the centre of a horrific child abuse and torture case says the Ottawa police did nothing to help him; in fact sided with his father, who is on trial for the abuse.

Only his strength of spirit helped him escape what he believes would have ultimately been his death. sentence. Looking at him today as he testified in court, it was hard to believe it was the same boy who had endured the things he had described, that anyone could survive that.

From the confines of his basement, where he says he had been shackled for the last six months, tortured, burned and starved by his father, a plan of desperation formed. 

'I was terrified, starving and thirsty,’ he told a hushed courtroom, ‘and I thought, "I can't take this anymore'.

The victim, who is now 13, was testifying in the abuse case against his 44-year-old father, a former RCMP officer and his 36-year-old stepmother.

In an adjoining room, away from his parents in the courtroom, he detailed each horrifying event at the hands of his father.  The boy says his father believed he was a demon.

‘He used a cross to take all the demons out of me, like an exorcism," he said. 

The victim, then 11 years old, slept naked most of the time on the concrete floor and had to urinate in a bucket.  He says his father made him drink it. Crown attorney Marie Dufort asked him how that made him feel.

‘That was disgusting,’ he told court, ‘I wished he (my father) was dead and my mom was still alive and he was gone forever.’

The boy's birth mother died in 2009.  After that, he came to live with his father and stepmother.  He says his father was consumed with thoughts that his son was impure and worried what his ex-wife had said about him, at one point, the boy says, even pointing his RCMP-issued revolver at the boy's head. 

‘I was very scared,’ he told court."

The boy, who was home-schooled after Grade 4, managed to escape a couple of times.  But he says police brought him back.  He tried telling them his father was only feeding him peanut butter and pita but he says his father convinced the police that it was the boy’s choice to eat only that. 

‘The police didn't do anything,’ he testified, 'they sided with my dad, didn't even investigate.  When they took me home, my dad hugged me and pretended to love me.'

Fearing for his life, he planned an escape one last time on February 12 of 2013 while his parents were at church.  He managed to stumble to a friend's house but even that nearly backfired when the friend's parents took him back home only to find no one there.  He slumped in the snow.  The next thing he remembers is waking in an ambulance.

The stepmother is also on trial.  When Crown Attorney Marie Dufort asked where she was in all this, the boy said his stepmother had told him once just to obey his father, do what he was told to do and he wouldn't get hurt as badly.

After that, the boy testified, she never talked or looked at him again.