Hossein Nayeri broke out of Orange County jail once, but this time his prospects for freedom are bleak

A bold Orange County jail break, two stints as an international fugitive, and an exceedingly light sentence for a drunken car crash that killed a close friend – for years, the man tied to all this and involved in a kidnapping that left a victim’s penis getting cut off eluded the full weight of the law.

Hossein Nayeri’s slippery ways ended earlier this month, when a Newport Beach jury found the former U.S. Marine-turned-pot-grower guilty of the kidnapping and the especially brutal torture of a marijuana dispensary owner, which Nayeri was accused of carrying out with two high school friends.

“Sadistic,” “manipulative,” “cunning,” “diabolical” – law enforcement officials have used many words to describe Nayeri, now age 40, with one prosecutor once comparing him to the fictional Hannibal Lecter.

Hours of Nayeri’s testimony and that of those who knew him, along with his lengthy court record, show a history of mental instability and violence.

“He is an absolute control freak, and you guys witnessed that,” Senior Deputy District Attorney Matt Murphy told the jury. “Can you think of a person who has had more breaks from the criminal justice system, more opportunities? Lives have been forever altered.”

After the recent verdicts, Murphy, who has prosecuted some of Orange County’s most grisly cases in recent years, including those of serial murderers, told reporters: “Nayeri is as maniacal a defendant as I have ever seen.”

U.S. Marine to pot grower

Born in Tehran, Nayeri moved from Iran to the United States in his early teens, living a short time in Irvine before his family settled in Fresno. He spoke only Farsi upon first entering the U.S. but quickly learned English while at Clovis West High School.

There, Nayeri met Ryan Kevorkian, a fellow wrestler, Naomi Rhodus, Kevorkian’s sweetheart, and Kyle Handley. He also met twin brothers who he followed into the Marine Corps.

Nayeri lasted only two years in the Marines.

In Nayeri’s telling, a surfing accident during his tenure at Camp Pendleton left him with extensive injuries and a lengthy hospital stay. When he finally returned to the base, Nayeri said, he still had problems with balance and a persistent ringing in his years, leading his superiors to consider him “damaged goods” and assigning him to a new unit.

“I sat down on the bed for a good half an hour, 45 minutes just staring around,” Nayeri testified, saying he didn’t even unpack after arriving at the barracks. “I couldn’t do it. I took my bag and threw it in my car and went back home.”

Nayeri’s AWOL led to a court-martial hearing, he said, and eventually a discharge and his return to Fresno, where he started growing marijuana, first as a therapeutic hobby and soon as a way of making money.

Nayeri has claimed to have pocketed hundreds of thousands to a million-plus dollars a year. Prosecutors, instead, portrayed Nayeri – and Handley, who Nayeri later teamed up with on a grow operation – as small-time growers.

At age 23, he met 16-year-old Shegerian and years later they would secretly marry despite her parents’ concerns. She testified that Nayeri essentially lived off of money he persuaded her to steal from her wealthy mom and dad.

In 2005, while driving drunk, Nayeri crashed after partying at a casino in Madera County, killing a close friend. He was charged with gross vehicular manslaughter and, while awaiting trial, fled to Iran.

During his months-long stay in Iran, Nayeri met and married another woman, a union, he would say, that was short-lived. Eventually, using someone else’s U.S. passport, he returned to the United States and was soon arrested for skipping out on his court hearings.

Despite having fled, Nayeri still received a suspended sentence for the vehicular manslaughter conviction rather than prison time. Numerous people had written to the judge on his behalf, some describing him as a loyal and considerate friend.

Shegerian and Nayeri’s relationship sank into deep dysfunction, with her later describing him as controlling. Nayeri would later tell police that he was bipolar and suffered from post-traumatic stress and suicidal thoughts.

“There were two parts of his personality,” Shegerian testified during Nayeri’s last trial, in Orange County Superior Court. “There was the nice, charming, manipulative, draw-you-in part.

“Then there was this angry, crazy, temper-driven part, and it could go from zero to a thousand in a minute,” said Shegerian, who would become a lawyer. “And I didn’t feel like I could tell him no to anything. …

“It is the two sides,” she said. “I had met him when I was 16 – it got serious when I was 21. I was not equipped to deal with it. I was in love with him, but there were these two sides, and I didn’t know how to reconcile them both.”

Tall, handsome, with dark and sharp features, and often with styled hair and aviator sunglasses, he offered a charismatic look.

In 2010, Nayeri’s father, a physician who had moved back to Iran, disappeared. Believed to have been kidnapped, he was never seen again.

The next year, on Jan. 5, Nayeri punched, choked and threatened Shegerian with a box cutter in their home, leading to court-ordered classes on domestic-violence education, prosecutors said. Several days later, they said, Nayeri forced his way into a neighbor’s apartment, stealing the man’s cellphone and wallet.

The surveillance and the kidnapping

The dispensary owner first came to Nayeri’s attention through Handley, who would occasionally stop by his Santa Ana store to either chat or sell small amounts of marijuana, usually around several thousand dollars’ worth at a time, the owner recalled during his testimony.

Handley twice spent time in Las Vegas with the dispensary owner, who The Orange County Register is not naming because of the nature of the crimes he suffered. Once, Handley was among the dispensary owner’s guests, with the owner covering the suites and providing them money to gamble.

“I thought he was a nice guy,” the dispensary owner later said of Handley. “We both liked playing poker. We both liked cultivating marijuana.

“I thought he was a very friendly guy, and he meshed well with (my) group. He wasn’t super crazy, we thought, and he was fun to be around.”

Unbeknownst to the dispensary owner, Nayeri had begun to watch him, using GPS and camera equipment that prosecutors say Rhodus obtained and registered under a false name.

Shegerian helped Nayeri switch out batteries on the tracking devices, she would say, as well as helped him cook poison burger patties to feed to a barking dog at the owner’s parents’ home. He was surveilling that residence, too, but the dog didn’t even get sick, which frustrated Nayeri, she said. In court, he said this whole scenario was only fiction.

One day, she said, Nayeri pointed out to her on his computer that the dispensary owner had gone to the Mojave Desert.

“I said in a jokingly manner that he must be Scrooge – Scrooge must be burying his money out there,” Nayeri acknowledged in his testimony.

In truth, the dispensary owner had driven out to the Mojave at the urging of an acquaintance who wanted him to invest in a mining operation.

On Sept. 26, 2012, Nayeri was driving home with cash and marijuana in his car when a Newport Beach officer tried to pull him over – kicking off a high-speed chase. Nayeri got away but left behind his vehicle – holding the surveillance equipment and the footage of the dispensary owner.

Days later, on Oct. 1, prosecutors say that Nayeri, Handley and Kevorkian – disguised in construction-worker clothing – snuck into the Newport Beach home where the dispensary owner was living. A neighbor spotted their vehicle, owned by Handley, and believing something was wrong, took down the license-plate number, authorities said.

The dispensary owner was awoken by three men, at least one armed with a pump-action shotgun. The dispensary owner – along with the girlfriend of the homeowner, away on business – were bound, blindfolded and forced into a van.

The kidnappers tortured the dispensary owner on the way to the desert, using a Taser, plastic tubing and a blowtorch. They repeatedly demanded he take them to the “million dollars,” ignoring his pleas that he didn’t have the money.

Once in the desert, the men doused the dispensary owner with bleach and cut off his penis.

In a trial brief citing conversations Nayeri is later accused of having with Shegerian, prosecutors wrote that Nayeri initially wanted Handley to cut off the penis. But Handley began vomiting, prosecutors wrote, so Nayeri had to “finish the job.”

Before they left, the men threw a knife out into the desert, telling the two kidnap victims that if they could find it and cut themselves free they could live, the dispensary owner and the girlfriend would testify.

The woman did find the knife, cut herself free, and walked barefoot to a nearby roadway where she flagged down a passing sheriff’s deputy.

The dispensary owner survived, but his missing body part was never found. When asked at the hospital who could possibly have targeted him for such a vicious attack, he had no answers for investigators.

Hours after the kidnapping and torture, Nayeri attended one of his last court-ordered domestic violence classes.

 

Escaping jail … for a while

The license-plate number from the neighbor lead to Handley, authorities said, a search of his home and truck turned up a zip tie that would be traced through DNA to Kevorkian, and a blue glove with DNA that led to Nayeri.

Nayeri quickly left for Iran. Investigators discovered the surveillance footage and equipment in his still-impounded vehicle, and confronted Shegerian when she came to pick it up.

Shegerian initially refused to cooperate with police, and continued to funnel money from her unknowing parents to Nayeri. An investigator contacted Shegerian’s father, and they persuaded her to tell police who she believed to be involved in the abduction.

Shegerian spent months building trust with Nayeri’s family before getting him to fly to meet her in the Czech Republic, a country law enforcement had determined would be willing to extradite Nayeri. Orange County officials didn’t believe she would actually pull it off. But the plan worked, and Nayeri was taken into custody and, in September 2014, nearly two years after the abduction, back in Orange County, in jail.

During the nighttime hours of Jan. 21, 2016, though, Nayeri and two other inmates, both with ties to Vietnamese gangs, made their way into plumbing tunnels behind the jailhouse walls, climbed rungs inside the tunnel to the roof and used a rope of bedsheets to rappel five stories down the side of the building.

For months, the escapees had cut though the half-inch steel bars that blocked the plumbing tunnels. Using a smuggled-in cellphone, they recorded the burrowing and their actual escape.

That daring escape, and subsequent massive manhunt, drew national attention.

A little more than a week later, Nayeri and his fellow escapees were back in custody.

The escape shined a spotlight on what sheriff’s officials described as an aging jail infrastructure. Since then, the Sheriff’s Department has spent more than $500,000 upgrading jail security, adding new personnel, motion-detecting cameras, security lights, strengthened bars, trackable ID cards for inmates, cellphone-sniffing dogs and other improvements.

In January 2018, Handley became the first to be convicted for the abduction and torture.

His attorney, aiming for at least some leniency, had argued that Handley appeared to have been the driver the night of the kidnapping. Still, his client got four life terms, two without parole.

Shegerian, because of her cooperation, avoided criminal charges.

Kevorkian and Rhodus were both charged; prosecutors say they are cooperating with investigators. They are expected to reach deals to resolve their cases prior to trial.

Early this month, Nayeri took the stand.

During several days of often-combative and occasionally tearful testimony, Nayeri admitted to surveilling the dispensary owner but denied being involved in the kidnapping.

Murphy, the senior deputy district attorney,  warned jurors not to believe Nayeri, comparing him to a cult leader with the “ability to manipulate people” who leaves “a trial of destruction behind him wherever he goes.”

Nayeri’s attorney, Sal Ciulla, derided the case against Nayeri as being based largely on circumstantial evidence. He described Shegerian as a liar, and questioned the forensic evidence collected by detectives, particularly the glove tied through DNA to Nayeri.

Nayeri’s emotional testimony, Ciulla said, was normal for someone accused of “something this twisted, this disgusting and this evil, and you didn’t do it.”

For several days, jurors were split 11 to 1 for conviction, with one woman holding out.

And then, for whatever reason, she changed her mind.

The jury didn’t find there was enough proof to say Nayeri had personally severed the man’s penis. But they all agreed he was guilty of two counts of kidnapping and one count of torture.

That is most likely enough to keep him locked up in a state prison forever, no matter how his jail-break trial plays out. When he returns to a courtroom on Oct. 11, he faces getting sentenced to two life terms without the possibility of parole.