VANCOUVER, Wash. (KGW) — From approximately July 2022 to March 2023, Negasi Zuberi lived in a Clark County home right by Prairie High School. Former neighbors told KGW they did not have a good feeling about the 29-year-old, who is now under investigation by the FBI, accused of kidnapping and violent sexual assault.
“He did make some threats toward me that he’d stab me or kill me if he catches me outside somewhere,” Danny Bratkov said.
Bratkov said he once got into a shouting match with Zuberi, and he recorded the altercation on his cell phone.
“That night he was yelling at me, he literally looked like a killer,” Bratkov said. “His eyes. It was scary.”
“I stayed away because I knew he was a hot head,” added another neighbor who wanted to remain anonymous.
The neighbor said she was not sure what Zuberi did for a living. She said he bred and sold pit bulls for cash, and also subleased space in his house.
“He was subleasing every single space you could possibly,” she said. “Literally the living room. I think they had an open area when you come up the stairs, a loft area, he was subleasing that. There were beds there. It was weird. A lot of different people.”
It may have been weird, but it pales in comparison to what the FBI revealed about Zuberi this week.
Federal agents say in mid-July he solicited a woman for sex in Seattle. Zuberi then told her he was an undercover cop and she was under arrest. Zuberi allegedly shackled the woman and drove her 450 miles south to his new home in Klamath Falls. Inside the garage of the home Zuberi was renting, he is accused of locking the woman up in a makeshift cell built out of cinderblocks.
“The woman fought for her life, beating the doors and the walls of this cell with bloodied hands and through her perseverance she broke free and waved down a passing motorist,” Stephanie Shark of the FBI said.
Within hours of the woman’s daring escape, police captured Zuberi in Nevada, one of 10 states he has called home in the last 10 years.
Since his arrest, detectives have tied Zuberi to three more sexual assaults in three of those states and they fear there could be even more victims. That might explain why the FBI paid a visit to Bratkov and his roommates.
“There were multiple victims and girls they showed pictures of to us, and they were asking if we knew about these people or girls,” Bratkov said. “We obviously didn’t know any of them.”
What Bratkov and other neighbors do recall is seeing a young woman crying outside Zuberi’s Vancouver home months ago, when he still lived there.
“My husband is like, ‘Do you want us to call the cops, do you need help, do you want some tea because it’s freezing out here,'” the other neighbors said. “She said, ‘No, I’m not going to tell you what he did to me.’ She said those exact words.”
Those words now haunt Zuberi’s old neighbors, who are relieved he is off the streets and behind bars.
“I’m so happy he’s gone, and hopefully it’ll be for a while,” Bratkov said.
A spokesperson for the Clark Co. Sheriff’s Office said in the time Zuberi lived in the area, deputies responded to his home for things like noise complaints, welfare checks, and neighbor disputes involving Zuberi, people he lived with and others, but nothing ever rose to a criminal level and no arrests were made.
To say that Zuberi moved around a lot would be an understatement, according to information provided by the FBI. Since 2014, public records indicate that he’s lived in or frequented about 17 cities or counties across the country, with the timelines often overlapping.
He’s believed to have spent at least August and September of 2022 between Vancouver and Portland, but the agency also placed him in Denver, Colorado during that time period. And Zuberi’s Vancouver neighbors say that he was at that address for much longer than the FBI timelines suggest. He’s also associated with a number of aliases, including Sakima, Justin Hyche and Justin Kouassi.
The FBI has encouraged any potential victims of Zuberi to visit the webpage they’ve established to get in contact or seek resources.
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