SALT LAKE CITY — An American fugitive known as Nicholas Rossi, accused of faking his own death and fleeing the country to avoid rape charges, is in a Utah jail after being extradited from Scotland last week, it emerged Monday from prison records.
Rossi, whose legal name is Nicholas Alahverdian, is accused of sexually assaulting a 21-year-old woman in Orem, Utah, in 2008, according to local prosecutors. He was not identified as a suspect until about a decade later due to a backlog of DNA testing kits at the Utah State Crime Lab.
Rossi is again accused of rape in Salt Lake County, where prosecutors say he sexually assaulted a 26-year-old ex-girlfriend after an argument, also in 2008. He faces multiple other complaints against him in Rhode Island and Ohio for allegedly domestic violence. sexual abuse and fraud.
The 36-year-old, who used at least a dozen aliases in his escape from the law, was booked into the Davis County Jail Friday afternoon, where many federal inmates in northern Utah reside. According to the Utah County Attorney's Office, he will likely be transferred to Utah County in the coming days to stand trial on rape charges.
His first court date had not yet been set as of Monday and records do not yet show who will represent him in court.
The American fugitive grew up in foster care in Rhode Island and had returned to the state before allegedly faking his death and fleeing the country. An obituary published online claims Rossi died on February 29, 2020 from late-stage non-Hodgkin lymphoma. But state police and his former foster family wondered if he was really dead.
Rossi was arrested in Scotland the following year after being admitted to a hospital in Glasgow while being treated for COVID-19. He insisted he was an Irish orphan named Arthur Knight who had never traveled to the US
After a lengthy court battle, an Edinburgh judge ruled in August that the extradition could go ahead. He called Rossi “as dishonest and deceitful as he was evasive and manipulative.” Rossi lost an appeal in December and was taken into custody by the US Marshals Service.