Jury selection starts Tuesday in the trial of Negasi Zuberi, accused of abducting two women last year, taking them to his Klamath Falls home and sexually assaulting them.
The government is expected to call about 70 witnesses in the trial against 30-year-old Zuberi, including the two women, the mayor of Klamath Falls who rented the home to Zuberi and the mayor’s husband and son who disassembled a cinder block cell found in the garage. FBI agents, state police and local police from Klamath Falls and Reno, Nevada, where Zuberi was arrested, are also on the government’s witness list.
Zuberi is accused of abducting a woman from Seattle in July 2023, driving her to Klamath Falls and sexually assaulting her during the drive, then imprisoning her in the makeshift cell before she managed to escape by beating on a metal screen security door and ripping through it with her hands until they bled, according to FBI agent Travis Gluesenkamp.
She ran out a garage access door into a front courtyard, climbed over a fence to the driveway and ran into the street, screaming for help, before a motorist stopped and called 911, Gluesenkamp testified in earlier court hearings.
Investigators found the woman’s blood throughout the cell, according to prosecutors.
Zuberi was subsequently charged with kidnapping another woman outside a Klamath Falls bar called The Pikey, holding her in a car in his garage for 12 hours and sexually assaulting her in May 2023.
He has pleaded not guilty to an indictment charging him with two counts of kidnapping, two counts of being a felon in possession of guns and ammunition, two counts of being a felon with ammunition and one count each of transportation for criminal sexual activity.
He was convicted of assault in 2021 for soliciting sex from a 16-year-old girl and then beating her in a remote area of Alameda County, California, according to court records. The victim is also on the government’s list of witnesses.
The trial, in federal court in Medford, is expected to last about three weeks.
The court earlier sent out questionnaires to potential jurors and received 99 back, according to U.S. District Judge Michael J. McShane. The judge said he was prepared to dismiss 20 of the potential jurors due to their medical issues, financial hardships and prepaid vacations, including one man who said he has tickets to take his grandchildren to Disneyland.
He said he also dismissed a number of people because they said this was their “harvest time” and they needed to do farm work.
At a pretrial conference Monday, Zuberi’s lawyers wanted to make sure the shackles on his ankles during the trial aren’t heard as he walks to and from the defense table and that the shackles are covered so jurors can’t see them.
Due to the courtroom’s small size, the judge also cautioned prosecutors and defense lawyers to keep their notes out of the view of potential jurors. He recalled what he said was an infamous Multnomah County case when potential jurors spotted a prosecutor’s material that listed the defendant’s name next to the term “murder.”
Two groups of 20 prospective jurors will be called into the courtroom Tuesday morning for questioning. One question high on the defense lawyers’ minds is whether any have heard or read about the case.
McShane said he will likely ask them one by one if they know anything about the case, and if so, whether what they know will affect their ability to fairly consider the evidence at trial.
Both sides agreed that jurors, once selected, will be told that Zuberi is also known as Sakima Zuberi and previously had different legal names of Justin Joshua Hyche and Justin Kouassi.
Months before Zuberi is accused of kidnapping the two women last year, prosecutors allege he stalked potential victims in early 2023 by following one teenager home from a mall in Washington state and affixing a GPS tracker on a Vancouver teen’s car the next day.
Zuberi then “switched his gaze” to Klamath Falls high school, where he took photos and videos of girls in the school parking lot and recorded their car license plates, Assistant U.S. Attorney Suzanne Miles wrote in court records.
Miles wrote that Zuberi also developed a so-called “targets list,” which included a bikini barista who worked in Seattle and a woman escort he found online.
The prosecution and defense have agreed not to call those two women as witnesses but an FBI agent is expected to testify how agents identified them after finding their names referenced in a blue notebook seized in the case.
Zuberi’s lawyers were unsuccessful in their attempt to have separate trials for the two alleged kidnappings and lost a bid to dismiss the case on grounds that the FBI allowed the dismantling of the cinder block structure before trial.
The lawyers are expected to challenge the veracity of the women’s accounts and point out that investigators at first declined to pursue the initial May 2023 sexual assault report.
Zuberi is being held at the Jackson County Jail during the trial.
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