A 42-year-old man who admitted to his role in the kidnapping, torture and sexual mutilation of a Newport Beach marijuana dispensary owner was sentenced this week to 12 years and four months in state prison.
Ryan Anthony Kevorkian pleaded guilty Wednesday, May 27, to two felony kidnapping charges along with felony counts of burglary and assault, court records show. He was given credit for the time already served behind bars in county jail since his November 2013 arrest.
Kevorkian’s attorney, Michael Molfetta, acknowledged that Kevorkian got involved in something he knew was wrong, but said his client had no way of knowing it would turn into one of the most grisly crimes in recent Orange County history.
Kevorkian has accepted responsibility for his role and straightforward with investigators and prosecutors, the defense attorney said.
“He always took the blame for what occurred,” Molfetta said. “His involvement, relative to the others, warranted a different sentence.”
Hossein Nayeri is accused of being the mastermind behind the 2012 abduction of a man and a woman, carrying it out with the aid of two high school friends to find a nonexistent $1 million the group apparently believed the marijuana dispensary owner had buried in the Mojave desert.
Prosecutors have described Nayeri as a “psychopath” who assembled a crew of “miscreants” driven by greed.
“The viciousness of it, the way it was carried out and those things that were done to the victim, that has Nayeri written all over it,” Molfetta said in a Thursday interview. “It is so horrible, it is so senseless.”
Kevorkian first met Nayeri – along with fellow co-defendants Kyle Handley and Naomi Rhodus – at Clovis West High School in Fresno. Nayeri and Handley became pot growers, and Handley met the dispensary owner who would become the victim of the kidnapping and torture through selling marijuana to him.
In the early morning hours of Oct. 2, 2012, three masked men broke into the Newport Beach home where the dispensary owner was living, kidnapping him and the girlfriend of the homeowner, who was out of town on business.
During a two-hour-plus drive to the desert, the men tortured the dispensary owner in the back of a van, hitting him with rubber piping, shocking him with a Taser and burning him with a blowtorch while demanding he give them the $1 million the victim kept saying he didn’t have, prosecutors said.
Once in the desert, the kidnappers cut off the dispensary owner’s penis, then left him and the woman bound as they drove off. The woman flagged down a law enforcement officer, and the dispensary owner survived, though authorities were unable to recover his body part.
Investigators eventually said Nayeri, Handley and Kevorkian were the kidnappers. Handley is accused of being the van’s driver, while Nayeri is accused in court papers as having cut the dispensary owner’s body part off.
Rhodus, Kevorkian’s ex-wife, was accused of purchasing the weapons and helping to rent the van. Nayeri’s then-wife, Cortney Shegerian, helped lure Nayeri back from Iran, where he had slipped away following the kidnapping, prosecutors said.
Nayeri gained further infamy by teaming up with two other inmates to escape from Orange County Jail while awaiting trial. He was taken back into custody following a weeklong manhunt that drew national attention.
Handley was the first to go to trial, in 2018, and was convicted of kidnapping for ransom, aggravated mayhem and torture. Nayeri’s trial followed in 2019, and he was convicted of kidnapping and torture, though the jury failed to reach a decision on a mayhem charged related to the cutting off of the body part.
Nayeri and Handley were both sentenced to multiple life terms in prison.
Rhodus is still awaiting trial, though prosecutors have indicated that, like Kevorkian, she will likely reach a plea deal.
This post first appeared on ocregister.com
ncG1vNJzZmhqZGy7psPSmqmorZ6Zwamx1qippZxemLyue82erqxnnZa7brPErapmaWJixqat0axkn6eiYrWqv4yrpqWdXZ67brfInaWaqKCeu6h506ipra2imnqwsoynnLCon6fBbq7EmpqhZZSewLGxzayYq7FdpMSvsdFo