According to this link, Klamath Falls Mayor and wife own the house the "cell" was built in and they knocked it down. This article also has pics of him purchasing the cement blocks. He's toast IMO. Prosecutors want two incidents tried together and he also has a felony conviction in another state.
From the link below, I have copied some of the article
“He hunted women,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Suzanne Miles wrote in court papers.
www.oregonlive.com
Two months before
Negasi Zuberi allegedly abducted a woman from Seattle, drove her to Oregon and locked her in a cinderblock cell in his Klamath Falls garage, he is accused of
kidnapping another woman outside a local bar, holding her in a car in his garage for 12 hours and sexually assaulting her, according to new court records.
Documents filed Monday by federal prosecutors reveal for the first time details of the alleged May 2023 kidnapping in Klamath Falls, including that an initial local police report described the assault as “consensual sex.”
Prosecutors want to try Zuberi, 30, for both cases at the same time and allege that the two show a pattern of predatory behavior and premeditation.
They cited seizure of security footage and store receipts that showed Zuberi made multiple purchases at a local Home Depot to buy pallets of cinder blocks and insulation panels that they say he used to construct a makeshift cell in his garage.
The store footage and receipts showed him stocking up on other supplies, including sound guard fiber, a security door and deadbolts, according to the prosecution’s pretrial motions.
They allege he stalked girls and women -- “waiting in shopping malls and high school parking lots to identify and record them " -- as he tracked them to their cars, jotted down their license plates and sometimes followed them home to “catalog where they lived,” according to the filings.
“He hunted women,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Suzanne Miles wrote in one document.
Zuberi, 30, has pleaded not guilty to an eight-count indictment that charges 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 and attempted escape.
Zuberi’s lawyers have asked the court to dismiss the charges, arguing that the owners of the home that Zuberi rented destroyed evidence when they dismantled and removed the cinderblock cell in the garage.
Klamath Falls’ mayor and her husband own the home.
Zuberi’s trial is scheduled for October. He remains in custody at the Jackson County Jail in Medford.
In 2021, Zuberi was convicted of a felony assault with a deadly weapon in Alameda County, California, after he solicited sex from a 16-year-old girl and then sexually assaulted her and beat her.
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Negasi Zuberi case evidence
HELD FOR 12 HOURS
The FBI arrested Zuberi last summer after federal authorities accused him of posing as an undercover police officer, kidnapping a woman from Seattle, sexually abusing her on the 452-mile-drive to his home in Klamath Falls and locking her in a homemade cinderblock cell in his garage on July 15.
The woman was able to escape from the cell by repeatedly beating on a metal screen door and ripping through it with her hands until they bled and then running out of the garage barefoot for help after grabbing a pistol out of Zuberi’s car, police said.
But police and prosecutors released little information until now about the other woman who said she encountered Zuberi outside a Klamath Falls bar on May 6, 2023.
According to the prosecution’s pretrial motions, the woman was stranded outside the bar without a ride and Zuberi used “pick-up lines” to try to lure her to his car.
She didn’t know Zuberi and tried to get rid of him by giving him her phone number after he wouldn’t stop asking for it, the court documents allege.
She walked away, looking for friends, and Zuberi joined her.
“She remembers him offering her a ride and remembers waking up in his car not knowing how she got there,” Miles wrote in one of the motions.
When the woman awoke, she noticed Zuberi was driving fast through downtown Klamath Falls and said he told her he was driving her to her friend’s house. After it became clear they were driving for an extended period of time, the woman demanded at one point that he pull over and tried to open the door to jump out when he slowed but he sped up, according to Miles.
Zuberi stopped in an area surrounded by fields and fired a black-and-yellow Taser into the woman’s ribs, the prosecutor wrote. When she screamed, Zuberi punched her repeatedly in the face and ribs before grabbing a pistol from under the driver’s seat and putting handcuffs around her wrists and ankles, Miles wrote.
“He warned that he would shoot her if she did anything stupid like that again and fired a shot out the window to show her the gun was real,” Miles wrote. “The spent shell casing fell on her leg and burned her.”
He covered the woman’s face with the hood of a sweatshirt and a blanket and drove home, backing his car into the garage, according to Miles. The woman told investigators that she spotted a pile of cinder blocks in the garage.
He held the woman for about 12 hours, letting her out of his car only to urinate in a bucket. While he kept her handcuffed in the back of his car, he occasionally beat her with his hand and the pistol, at one point holding the gun barrel up to her teeth, Miles wrote. He took her phone and removed its battery, the prosecutor wrote.
Zuberi told the woman that she wouldn’t get hurt anymore if she had sex with him and she relented under extreme duress, the prosecutor wrote.
Zuberi then sexually assaulted the woman multiple times in the car, Miles alleged in the motions.
He took a photo of the woman’s driver’s license and threatened to kill her and her family if she called the police, Miles wrote. But the woman convinced him to let her go, saying she needed to care for her sick dog, according to the records.
Zuberi drove to a bank, withdrew $300 from an ATM at 1:36 p.m. on May 6, 2023, and gave it to the woman to pay for the damage he caused to her face and then dropped her off near her house, Miles wrote.
The woman reported the attack to Klamath Falls police and told them she had been threatened with a gun, Tased and assaulted, according to the prosecution’s filings.
The Klamath Falls police report incorrectly said the woman and her attacker had “consensual sex,” the prosecutors noted. A federal review of an officer’s body camera recording of the woman’s interview showed she had told police that’s what her assailant would claim.
ALLEGED INCONSISTENCIES
Zuberi’s lawyers, Amy Potter and Michael Bertholf, have asked the court to try him separately on each alleged kidnapping, arguing that trying all the charges in one trial would be prejudicial.
They’ve also pointed out alleged inconsistencies in the local victim’s accounts to police and noted that Klamath Falls police initially “declined to pursue the case” after the woman’s first report, according to their motions.
“Only after months of additional review and Mr. Zuberi’s insistence on a trial, did the government add both the kidnapping charges and the firearms counts in an effort to bolster its case against Mr. Zuberi,” Potter and Berthold wrote in their motions.
In the May 2023 case, they said, federal charges aren’t merited because the woman wasn’t taken across state lines.
They’ve also sought to throw out search warrants obtained for Zuberi’s cars and home, arguing the affidavits submitted for the warrants contained errors.
The prosecutors conceded some errors in affidavits, acknowledging for example that an affidavit wrongly included that Zuberi showed the Seattle woman a police badge and vest. The prosecutors contend the errors were minor and did not impact the probable cause found to support them.
Prosecutors also have countered that Zuberi used a cellphone, a bank ATM, a GPS device and the internet — all instruments of interstate commerce — during the course of the May 2023 case to support the federal charge.
On the dismantled cinderblock cell, prosecutors said the FBI and police took at least 250 photos of the makeshift cell and nearly 20 minutes of video footage before allowing the homeowners to take down and remove the roughly 286 cinder blocks. It took a contractor to deconstruct the 10,000-pound structure with a sledgehammer, according to Miles and her colleagues Assistant U.S. Attorneys Jeffrey S. Sweet and Nathan J. Lichvarcik.
Police searches turned up evidence that Zuberi had bought Tasers, tire spikes, handcuffs, and leg irons last year. He obtained cellphone jammers. He bought magnetic slap-on tracking devices and paid a monthly subscription for a tracking service he dubbed, “Operation 1,” on his phone. He also bought a rural property in Bonanza in southern Oregon where investigators suspect he planned on building a concrete “house” 100 feet underground, according to prosecutors.
The prosecutors want the two alleged kidnappings tried together, citing their similarities.
“Mr. Zuberi committed these crimes using his own car and his own home, and he gave each victim an unfettered view of his face,” Miles wrote to the court.
But Zuberi altered his tactics slightly, the prosecutors said.
When the woman abducted from outside the bar in May was taken to the garage of the Klamath Falls home, the cinder blocks were piled up in the garage but the cell hadn’t been built yet, prosecutors said.
The Seattle woman in the July kidnapping was locked in the cell but clawed her way out, grabbed a pistol from Zuberi’s car, escaped out of the garage, climbed over his fence and ran barefoot into the road, screaming for help, police said.
Negasi lived in the rented Klamath Falls house with two children and the mother of his children.
After the Seattle woman escaped on July 15, Zuberi fled too, prosecutors said. He hid evidence in an RV at a storage lot and then drove with his family to Reno, Nevada, where he was cornered in a Walmart parking lot after officers tracked his location using the GPS on his phone, Miles wrote in court records.
During the standoff, according to the prosecutor, Zuberi threatened to kill himself and conceded to a crisis negotiator, “I’m f-----.”
-- Maxine Bernstein covers federal court and criminal justice. Reach her at 503-221-8212,
mbernstein@oregonian.com, follow her on X
@maxoregonian, or on
LinkedIn.
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