A kidnapped woman punched her way out of a cinderblock cell. Police say she may have saved countless others
Negasi Zuberi has been convicted with kidnapping and raping two women including holding one of his victims hostage in a soundproof cinderblock cell. Bevan Hurley and James Liddell dig deeper into the case
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When Negasi Zuberi moved with his wife and two young children into a quiet street in Klamath Falls, Oregon, early last year, residents didn’t notice anything unusual.
To former neighbor Melania McClure, the North Eldorado Avenue resident was polite but not overfriendly, and didn’t seem to follow a regular schedule, she told NBC News.
But on July 15, 2023, the quiet suburban community was shaken after a bloodied woman flagged down a car outside the Zuberis’ home and begged the driver to call 911.
Zuberi had kidnapped and raped two women, including holding one of his victims hostage in a soundproof cinderblock cell.
All the while, his wife and children were home, according to Law & Crime.
Upon a search of his property, police found “Operation Take Over”: a series of notes and drawings containing his chilling, cryptic plans to evade the law.
On October 18, 2024, Zuberi was convicted of two counts of kidnapping, transporting a victim for criminal sexual activity and illegally possessing a firearm and ammunition as a previously convicted felon, according to a statement from Oregon’s District Attorney’s office.
Zuberi now faces life imprisonment at his sentencing.
The kidnapping
Zuberi abducted a woman working as a sex worker in Seattle after posing as a police officer at around midnight on July 14, 2023, according to the FBI.
Pointing a taser at her, the father-of-two shackled the victim in handcuffs and leg irons before bundling her into the back seat of his car and driving her 450 miles back to his Klamath Falls residence.
Zuberi was said to have made several stops to sexually assault the victim.
The woman was then locked in a cinderblock dungeon Zuberi purposefully built in the garage of his modest one-story rental home. Its metal door was installed in reverse so it could only be opened from the outside.
“After ensuring the victim was secure in the room, Zuberi left,” the Klamath Falls Police Department announced in August last year.
The woman fell asleep briefly, before she “awoke to the realisation that she would likely die if she did not attempt to escape,” the FBI said.
For hours, the woman punched the door until her firsts were bloody, according to authorities.
The victim was eventually able to break the welds and pull the metal screen material down and climb through a small gap.
As she made her escape, she grabbed a handgun from Zuberi’s vehicle before flagging down a passing motorist who called 911, according to the DA’s office.
The FBI praised the woman for “her quick thinking and will to survive” that “may have saved other women from a similar nightmare,” according to a statement made less than a month after Zuberi’s arrest.
Zuberi’s arrest
Klamath Falls Police Department obtained a search warrant for Zuberi’s property and found the makeshift dungeon in his garage as the victim had described, the FBI says.
Upon their search, investigators found “Operation Take Over”.
“Leave phone at home. Make sure they don’t have a bunch of ppl in their life. You don’t want any type of investigation,” one handwritten note read.
“Dig a hole straight down 100ft,” another note said alongside a diagram.
Police traced the suspect’s cellphone and learned he was 250 miles southeast in Reno, Nevada.
Using cellphone technology, two Nevada State Police troopers located Zuberi in a Walmart car park in South Reno on 16 July, 2023.
When they approached his vehicle, Zuberi was said to be holding his child in the car and his wife was outside talking to him.
He was arrested after a 45-minute standoff, which saw him cut himself with a knife and bleed “profusely,” according to the criminal complaint.
Another victim
While investigating the first victim, the FBI discovered another victim had been abducted and sexually assaulted six weeks before the July 15 kidnapping.
Zuberi approached a 22-year-old woman at a Klamath Falls bar celebrating Cinco de Mayo who was stranded without a ride on May 6, 2023. After offering to drive her to a friend’s house, he bound the woman by her wrists and ankles, according to the superseding indictment.
After the victim refused to have sex with Zuberi, he raped her several times which he recorded, prosecutors said.
“Your body will never be just yours again,” Zuberi said in the tape, according to the victim’s testimony on October 16, 2024, in a Medford courthouse.
The victim observed a pile of cinderblocks in Zuberi’s garage, which would later be turned into the dungeon where the other victim was held.
Zuberi eventually released the victim and said if she went to the police he’d kill her family and release the tape.
“I genuinely thought I was dying,” the witness told the grand jury.
She claimed that Zuberi told her he planned to force women to have his children so he could “raise an army.”
On February 15, 2024, a second kidnapping charge and charges for illegally possessing firearms, ammunition, and attempted escape were added by superseding the indictment.
The FBI said last August that it had linked Zuberi to other violent sexual assaults in at least four states. “There could be more,” the bureau warned at the time.
Who is Negasi Zuberi?
According to the FBI, Zuberi, was known under three separate monikers – “Sakima,” “Justin Hyche,” and “Justin Kouassi” –and had lived in 10 different states since 2016: California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Utah, Florida, New York, New Jersey, Alabama, and Nevada.
In a statement, the FBI said it had linked Zuberi to four other violent sexual attacks and feared there may be more victims.
Klamath Falls police said Zuberi is believed to have several different methods to gain control of his victims including drugging their drinks, pretending to be a police officer, and soliciting the services of sex workers and then violently sexually assaulting them.
As per the more recently unearthed victim, some of the encounters were filmed to make it appear as if the assault was consensual, police said.
The victims were threatened with retaliation if they notified the police.
The FBI believes he targeted sex workers or roommates across the 10 different states he’s lived between August 2016 and July 2023.
A name linked to one of his aliases, Justin Hyche, shows his last known address in Antioch, California.
At the time of Zuberi’s arrest, Hyche has four criminal incidents on file, including possession of a firearm in public in Illinois, and driving more than 100mph in California.
Hyche also has civil court judgments listed against him in court states, New York, California, Illinois, and Alabama.
Neighbors stunned
Residents of Klamath Falls, a town of about 25,000 people just over the Oregon border from California, were left stunned at the point of Zuberi’s arrest last summer – including his wife.
His former neighbor, McClure, said that Zuberi’s wife had no idea about her husband’s alleged actions and “was doing her best to navigate this.”
A month after the arrest, it also emerged that Zuberi had rented the home from Carol Westfall, mayor of Klamath Falls, and her husband.
In a statement to FOX 12, Westfall said she was “shocked and dismayed by what has occurred.”
“We applaud the actions of this woman in helping capture this person and preventing him from committing further atrocities,” the mayor added at the time.