Negasi Zuberi picked up the woman along Seattle’s Aurora Avenue, a prostitution hotspot known as The Blade, then drove her to an alley and handed her a $100 bill for sex, she testified Wednesday.
After they were done in the back seat of Zuberi’s SUV, she looked down momentarily. When she looked back up: “He had a Taser pointed at my face,” she told a crowded courtroom.
That was the start of harrowing trip that led to kidnapping, gun and other charges against Zuberi, a 30-year-old Klamath Falls man now on trial in federal court in Medford.
Zuberi has pleaded not guilty to abducting and attacking the Seattle woman and a second woman who lives in Klamath Falls just two months apart last year.
The Seattle woman’s alleged kidnapping and escape in mid-July 2023 drew national attention after authorities tracked Zuberi the next day to a Walmart parking lot in Reno, Nevada, and arrested him in a tense standoff with his longtime partner and mother of his two children in his Honda Pilot.
On the witness stand, the Washington woman said Zuberi claimed to be an undercover cop in a sting operation who had been watching her but “went too far” after approaching her for sex on the Seattle street about 11 p.m. on July 14, 2023.
He snapped handcuffs around her wrists and leg irons around her ankles, claiming he was taking her to a transition center, she said during three hours of testimony.
But she noticed he was getting on Interstate 5 southbound, and they drove for hours. She kept asking where he was taking her, she said. She tried to text and call her pimp when she first got in Zuberi’s white Honda Pilot but her phone surprisingly didn’t work, she said.
At one point, Zuberi reached down by his feet, picked up a gun and flashed it at her, saying, “So you know I’m serious,” the woman told jurors.
“Are you kidnapping me?” she said she asked him. “In my mind, I knew that he was, but I didn’t really want to believe it.”
She also asked if he was going to kill her. She said he responded, “You’re too valuable. Why would I hurt a princess like you?”
During the 450-mile trip, Zuberi got off the freeway and stopped “in the middle of nowhere,” she said. He forced her to perform oral sex on while she remained cuffed and shackled and raped her, she said.
At another stop along the drive, he got out to urinate behind the car and she spotted the maps app on his cellphone that revealed the destination was two-plus hours away in Oregon, the woman testified.
“I was so scared,” she said. “I didn’t know where he was taking me. I didn’t know what he was planning to do.’’
At times, he tried to calm her down and acted friendly, letting her choose music on his phone and asking her personal questions, everything from her birth date and Zodiac sign to whether her long black hair was real, she said. But then he would suddenly switch and act “insane” and “super paranoid,” she testified.
Her voice quickened as she described arriving at the apparent destination.
All she could see was a garage door because he had her put a sweatshirt hood over her head, she said. Once parked, he led her a short distance and removed her hood, she said.
She was inside a small, bare room in the garage, with a lone chair and exposed light bulb and wires. She said it was noticeably hot inside. He gave her a bucket to urinate in.
“What is this? Are you going to leave me in here?’” she said she asked. She told him, “I can’t stay in here. I’m going to freak out. I’m claustrophobic.”
Zuberi kept up the charade that he was a cop, she testified. He claimed the room was “just for interrogation” and was purposely hot to “make people sweat” and “to tell the truth,” she said. He claimed he had to talk to others, would get her a uniform and “process” her.
At one point, she gasped when he showed up with a drill to tighten screws on the door to ensure it locked tightly, she said.
She said Zuberi chuckled as he responded: “This is not what you think. This isn’t ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre.’”
Then he handed her a handwritten questionnaire that asked for her address, Social Security number, her record of vaccinations and any sexually transmitted diseases, she said. He brought her a blanket and a bottle of water and she fell asleep on the floor of the cell for an hour or two, having been up all night, she said.
When she awoke, the air was so thick she couldn’t breathe, she said, and she started pouring water on herself.
“I lost it, I was freaking out,” she told jurors. She walked around the room, tapping the walls to find any weak spot, she said. She paced and yelled for help, even putting her head against the concrete floor to try to scream under the door but felt her voice was “trapped in the room,” noticing Styrofoam padding on the cell door, she said.
She started punching the locked door with her right hand, describing that at that moment she was “so angry and scared and panicking.”
The woman said she bit off her long, silver acrylic nails one by one so she could make a fist and started pounding on the metal mesh-covered door of the cell.
During a pause in testimony, two FBI agents carried the metal door into the courtroom, stood it before the jury box and had the woman come forward and describe how she escaped.
Standing in front of the door, she said she first sat on the ground and pressed her legs against the door but got nowhere. She then stood and demonstrated how she started punching the door with her right hand and then used both hands to pound on it.
The mesh covering the door broke off, she said. She said she checked if her head could fit through a rectangular slat in the door.
At prosecutor Jeffrey Sweet’s request, she demonstrated how her head fit through the slat as jurors watched in silence.
“Are you comfortable putting your head through here?” Sweet asked. She turned her head sideways and showed how she was able to fit it through the small opening in the door.
That day, she said she put on sweatpants Zuberi had given her and scraped her legs as she squeezed through the slat headfirst. Once she got past the metal door, she pulled apart Styrofoam on a second, dead-bolted wooden door, and kicked and broke that door open and escaped.
“The cold air hit me,” she testified. “That was such a relief.”
The woman fell on her hands, moved a tarp out of her way and noticed she was in a garage, she said. She recalled Zuberi showed her he had a gun in the SUV, so she opened the driver’s-side door and grabbed it.
She said she took the magazine, checked it was loaded, and put one round in the chamber and fled with the gun.
She found a side door in the garage unlocked and ran out barefoot, scaled a wooden fence in front of the home and ran wildly into the street toward a car headed in her direction, she said.
“Please help me ! Stop!” she said she yelled.
Melissa Geary, a Depoe Bay resident who was in Klamath Falls to attend a Comic Con, was driving to the site when she saw a woman running toward her RAV4 Ford along a residential road just before noon on July 15, 2023.
Geary, who was dressed up as Rosie the Riveter for the convention, stopped her car.
“He’s going to kill me! He’s going to kill me!” the woman was yelling, Geary testified. “She was hysterical. I had never seen anybody so afraid in my entire life.”
The woman got into the back seat and crouched down, Geary said. “I told her we’re going to get her somewhere safe,” said Geary, a mother of two daughters who works as a peer support specialist.
Geary drove the woman to a nearby KFC and called 911. She called the emergency line a second time, about 10 to 15 minutes later, because “they didn’t respond quick enough.”
The Seattle woman, now 22, said she had no idea what city she was in and had never heard of Klamath Falls.
She told the local police sergeant who arrived that she had no phone and no ID with her and handed over the gun she had taken from the home.
She relayed to the sergeant what had happened, and how her kidnapper had said he was a cop who claimed he was taking her to a transition center, which wasn’t a jail, but a place to decide what to do with her.
“I kept questioning it. It didn’t make sense. It was such a detailed intricate story,” she told the sergeant, according to the sergeant’s bodycam video played in court.
She said she drove with the sergeant to try to identify the house where she had been held. They drove past the house initially but eventually she was able to point it out, she testified.
Police first took her to Sky Lakes Medical Center in Klamath Falls but it didn’t have a sexual assault nurse examiner to conduct a forensic exam, so they took her to a hospital in Medford.
Sweet, the prosecutor, showed jurors photos of the woman’s bloodied knuckles from her escape.
“Why did you try so hard” to get out of the cell, Sweet asked her.
“I knew I needed to get out of there,” she said, adding, “to get out of there alive.”
Asked why she took the loaded gun from the Honda SUV, she said if Zuberi showed up in the garage, she would have pointed it at him. If he came toward her, she said she would have shot him.
In a brief cross-examination, defense lawyer Michael Bertholf asked why the woman hadn’t used Zuberi’s phone during the car ride to call 911 or use her own pepper spray and Taser in her purse against Zuberi.
The woman said she feared if she did anything, he would shoot her.
Asked why she didn’t try to run away from the car when he stopped several times, she said: “He said there was nothing for miles and I’d starve before anyone got to me.”
Zuberi has pleaded not guilty to 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 of transportation for criminal sexual activity. The trial is expected to last three weeks.
— Maxine Bernstein covers federal court and criminal justice. Reach her at 503-22-8212, mbernstein@oregonian.com, follow her on X @maxoregonian, or on LinkedIn.
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