| Orange County District Attorney’s office. |
| Kyle Handley. |
In what is arguably one of the most vile stories out of the medical marijuana world we’ve ever seen, four people have been charged with kidnapping, torturing and castrating the owner of a medical marijuana dispensary in California.
Their reasoning? They thought the unnamed owner has buried a large amount of cash in the desert and they wanted the location.
All of this went down about a year ago in October 2012 after the owner (whose name and dispensary has been redacted from reports due to the nature of the crime), took some of his growers out for a huge weekend in Vegas. Included in that group was Kyle Handley, 34, who came back and told his three friends about how wealthy his boss truly was.
The foursome then began watching the dispensary owner, noting that he often went out to the desert. They figured – much like Walter White on AMC’s “Breaking Bad” – that the owner was burying cash for safekeeping. So Handley, Ryan Kervorkian, Naomi Kervorkian and Hossein Nayeri took the least sensible, most horrific approach they could come up with.
On Oct. 2, the four kidnapped the owner and the girlfriend of his roommate. They zip-tied his hands, beat him and stole cash from his home. They then put the two in a van and drove them out to the spot in desert where the foursome had seen the owner visit in the past. We’ll let the FBI report fill in the rest of the details:
The four continued “to torture John Doe throughout the drive by burning him with a blow torch. Once in the desert, the defendants are accused of sexually mutilating the victim by cutting off his penis. They are accused of pouring bleach on the victim in an effort to destroy any DNA evidence and dumping both victims on the side of the road.” The foursome allegedly took the dispensary owner’s penis with them to prevent it from being saved. The girlfriend wasn’t tortured and eventually was able to flag down police. The owner of the dispensary spent months in the hospital recovering.
To make matters even worse, the fumbling foursome were completely off-base about the dispensary owner’s desert trips. He wasn’t burying cash, he was discussing an investment deal.
Thankfully, Handley was arrested within days of the incident and police were able to collect DNA evidence from the crime scene that eventually linked all four people to the scene of the crime. The Kervorkians were arrested a few weeks after Handley in Newport Beach, Calif. while Nayeri, who had fled to Iran initially, was tracked down in the Czech Republic.
All four are back in Orange County jail now, facing charges of aggravated mayhem, torture and burglary. They all face life in prison without a chance for parole if convicted
Handley has already pleaded not-guilty. He still fingers the other three for the crime, however. “It is my hope that by bringing to justice these three additional people it will become clear that Mr. Handley was not involved in this demonic criminal enterprise,” Robert K. Weinberg, Handley’s attorney in a statement.