In the first of two trials in Utah, a jury found Nicholas Rossi guilty of the 2008 rape. He’ll be sentenced on Oct. 20.
A Rhode Island man accused of faking his death and fleeing the United States to evade rape charges was found guilty late Wednesday of sexually assaulting a former girlfriend in his first of two Utah trials.
An eight-person jury in Salt Lake County found Nicholas Rossi guilty of a 2008 rape after a three-day trial in which his accuser and her parents took the stand. Rossi, 38, declined to testify on his own behalf. He will be sentenced on Oct. 20 and is set to stand trial in September on another rape charge in Utah County.
First-degree felony rape carries a punishment in Utah of five years to life in prison, said Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill.
“We are grateful to the survivor in this case for her willingness to come forward, years after this attack took place,” Gill said in a statement. “It took courage and bravery to take the stand and confront her attacker to hold him accountable.”
Utah authorities began searching for Rossi, whose legal name is Nicholas Alahverdian, when he was identified through a decade-old DNA rape kit in 2018. He was among thousands of rape suspects identified and later charged when Utah made a push to clear its rape kit backlog.
Months after he was charged in Utah County, an online obituary claimed Rossi died on Feb. 29, 2020, of late-stage non-Hodgkin lymphoma. But police in his home state of Rhode Island, along with his former lawyer and a former foster family, cast doubt on whether he was dead.
