How is this woman allowed to practice law in California?
When three men escaped from the Orange County jail, officials quickly decided only one of the escapees possessed the cunning and resourcefulness to mastermind it: Hossein Nayeri, a 37-year-old ex-Marine who faced charges in a grisly kidnapping and torture plot.
Around Nayeri’s former wife, 29-year-old Cortney Shegerian, the anxiety was extreme. She was rushed into hiding. She assumed a fake name. During the eight days Nayeri was on the run — from his escape on Jan. 22 to his capture Saturday morning — the people around her feared for her life.
As the manhunt dragged on, authorities were convinced that if Nayeri remained in California, it was to stalk and kill her. Her lawyers, and the district attorney’s office, implored the media not to mention her name, for fear of inflaming him.
The source of Nayeri’s rage? Shegerian had played a central role in putting him behind bars in the first place, participating in an elaborate law-enforcement scheme to lure him out of Iran — and into an extradition-friendly country — in November 2013.
Shegerian, now an employment-rights attorney at a prominent Santa Monica firm, had admitted to detectives that she helped her husband conduct surveillance on a Newport Beach pot-dispensary owner, who was later abducted and tortured, his penis severed. Facing the possibility of criminal charges, she agreed to cooperate against her husband…
At her husband’s behest, she said, she made hamburger patties laced with an unknown poison intended for the parents’ dog, because it was too loud, according to Peters’ testimony. “She stated she assumed they were given to (the victim’s) parents’ dog,” Peters said. It wasn’t clear if that part of the plan was carried out.
Before the kidnapping, she heard Handley and her husband in her garage experimenting with a butane torch, according to Peters’ testimony. Further, Peters said, “Mr. Nayeri borrowed her pink Taser.”
…In 2005, Nayeri was arrested in connection with a drunk-driving crash in Madera County that killed his best friend, a 26-year-old aspiring sports broadcaster. He pleaded guilty to drunk driving and causing great bodily injury, which resulted in a year in prison and probation, according to the victim’s lawyer.
In 2009, when she was 22, Shegerian wrote a letter to a Madera County judge in support of Nayeri, describing herself as a pre-law student who had known him for nearly seven years.
…hey married in 2010 and lived together in Irvine, but had been married only seven months when she filed a domestic violence restraining order against him. She claimed he had pinned her to the floor with his foot on her chest, and put her in a chokehold. She said he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety, and had been drinking heavily. She said he threatened to kill her with a box cutter.
“He could definitely come and try to hurt or kill me,” she wrote in court documents.
A Los Angeles judge annulled their marriage in 2015 on the basis of bigamy, ruling that he had not legally ended a previous marriage to a woman in Iran, where he had lived…
The California State Bar would not comment on whether it was aware of her connection to the kidnapping case when it admitted her in May 2014.
Weinberg — who represents Handley, one of Nayeri’s co-defendants in the kidnapping and torture case — said Shegerian was the only witness against his client and questioned whether her account can be believed.
“How can she say she was unaware there was a criminal enterprise?” Weinberg said. “Imagine someone inquisitive enough to go to law school not asking her husband, ‘Why do you want me to poison a dog?'”
Here’s another story on this case:
ESL teacher may have played a ‘significant role’ in helping 3 O.C. inmates escape
Hossein Nayeri graduated from high school near Fresno and served in the U.S. Marine Corps.
Despite this American upbringing, though, the inmate managed to enroll in an English-as-a-second-language class at Men’s Central Jail in Orange County.
There, he befriended his teacher, Nooshafarin Ravaghi. She was 44 and the author of several children’s books. He was 37 and awaiting trial in a torture and kidnapping case. Both had family roots in Iran.
The two began a written correspondence that a Sheriff’s Department spokesman said was “far closer than appropriate.”
Now, Ravaghi is suspected of helping her student and two other inmates escape. She has admitted to giving Nayeri a Google Maps printout showing the roof of the jail, but has denied providing him with the cutting tools the trio used to break out of the high-security lockup, authorities said.
