Control

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Brad Zimmer was a gym teacher at Clovis West High School in Fresno, California. I think organized sports is a great way for kids to learn a lot of life lessons. Brad has spent three decades teaching hundreds, thousands of kids that sports is about more than just throwing a ball. But there's only one student that he still asked so many questions about. Hussein. Nairi. In 1994, Brad was the wrestling coach at Clovis West, and Hussain was a new kid in his freshman class.

Hussein had emigrated from Iran a couple of years earlier, and he was a quiet student, still coming to grips with speaking English instead of Farsi. Rad noticed how this new student... seemed different around the other wrestlers. The wrestlers are a very tight-knit group. They were always together. They were always doing something silly. And Hussein would participate, but he kind of always seemed like he was maybe above it. He would kind of laugh.

But he never was kind of all in on the jokes. It took time for Hussein to settle in socially. But wrestling, now that seemed to make more sense to him. He worked hard to get better. Other wrestlers got used to seeing Hussein in the gym almost every day. There's a photo of him in the yearbook from his senior year, just his upper torso poking out from a team photo. His eyebrows are dark.

Serious. He's wearing a wrestling singlet. His neck is thick. His shoulders and arms bulging. The work in the gym has paid off. He jumped weight classes. He got good. By his final year, Hussein had made the varsity team. He wasn't the best wrestler at the school, but Brad said he had a particular quality that great wrestlers have, self-control.

The ability to engage in the physicality of wrestling and stay level-headed. If your temper gets away from you, it can boil over and now you've lost control of the match because you and your... you know wrestling angry you're not controlling your moves and you're not you know usually controlling your opponent you're just kind of uh fighting brad spent a lot of time with hussein

He doesn't remember his student ever losing his cool on the mat. But the person Brad knew back then doesn't match with what he's heard about Hussein Ayeri since. I have these memories of this this young man I coached and you hear of the story and you know they're the same person but you really don't I don't think you put the two together.

The story that Brad talked about is the story of kidnap, torture, and mutilation. Of grabbing two people from their beds in the middle of the night and leaving them for dead in the desert. What Brad Zimmer was looking at were only the bookends of Hussein Nairi, two parts of his life with a wide expanse of unknown in between. On one end, a quiet, hardworking teenager.

On the other, a person whose DNA was found on the glove at the scene of a brutal crime, with investigators saying, this isn't just a participant, this is the mastermind of it all. So, who is Hussein Nairi? And what is in the middle of those bookends? In this episode, we'll find out from some of the people who knew him best. This is the descent of Nyeri. From promising young athlete to a man on the run. From ABC News, this is Devil in the Desert. Episode 3. Control.

If you stuck a pin right in the geographic center of California, in the wide expanse between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, you'd hit the city of Fresno. And Clovis is a town on the city's edge, with tree-lined streets and pretty good schools. That's where Brad Zimmer met Hussein Nayeri, in this sprawling, pretty suburb.

Brad remembered that the Nairi family wasn't wealthy and that they lived in one of the more modest units in town. When they first moved over from Iran, it was the whole family. Hussein, the middle child between an older brother and a younger sister, and their parents. The Nayeris were well-educated. Mr. Nayeri was a doctor, his wife a lawyer. Hussein was smart, and everybody could see that, but he didn't exactly excel academically, and Brad got the sense that it caused friction at home.

I always felt and kind of from Hussein telling me that he was kind of maybe the black sheep. I think his brother was very studious and the expectations that he'd be, you know, do well in school. Not long after they arrived in California, Hussein's father went back to Iran, and Hussein's relationship with his mother seemed to deteriorate rapidly.

Hussein came and stayed at my house a few times. I remember at least once picking him up and he was kind of sitting outside the house on the curb and his mom had, I think... I don't know if she kicked him out or what, but he came and stayed with me a couple nights because he was having problems at home. After high school, Hussein didn't go to college. Instead, he and his buddy from Clovis enlisted in the Marine Corps.

and headed to San Diego for boot camp. Hussein, the hard-working varsity wrestling team member, was a perfect fit. He applied to the Marine Corps Reconnaissance Unit, a highly competitive program similar to special operations. He was accepted. But that's when things started to go wrong. He got in a bad surfing accident where he fractured his skull and burst his eardrum. After he recovered, he went AWOL. He walked right off that base and drove back to Fresno.

without permission from his superiors. As punishment, the military gave him 47 days in the brig and then discharged him. After military jail, Hussein came back to Fresno and spent a few years...

dabbling. He enrolled at Fresno College, but didn't graduate. In the summer of 2003, he started picking up shifts at a local cafe. That's where I met Courtney Shigerian. I reached out to her in 2019, hoping that she could tell me more about the type of person Hussein Nayeri really was. She's in her 30s now, and Hussein is someone that she's known her entire adult life. And actually, a little more than that. But back in 2003...

Hussein was just a server at a brunch place she liked to go to. Where and when did you first meet him? So I first met him at the Mimi's Cafe in Fresno, you know, when I was 16. 16? 16. How old was he? Teenager, 23. What was he like? He was funny and charming and, I mean, you know, just... Cute. Cute. Funny, charming, cute. Intriguing for a 16-year-old teenager. Jen Tindall was another server at Mimi's Cafe and a good friend of Hussein's.

She was there that Sunday in the fall of 2003 when Courtney came in. She was also working the brunch shift, and she agreed. Hussein was handsome. He's about five... Nine, about five, eight and a half. Very in shape, very charming, very good looking. Jen had just graduated high school, the same one that Hussein had attended six years earlier, Clovis West.

She was younger than him, closer to Courtney's age, in fact. When she saw Courtney, she remembered thinking, that girl looks young. But she noticed that... Courtney had come in a few times and always requested a table in Hussein's section. I had gone into the memes a couple of times and he always like, you know, chatted me up. And this one particular time, my cousin left my phone number for him and then he called me. Courtney and Hussein started seeing each other and she was smitten.

She told him that she was 18, a freshman at Fresno College. And for the first few months, things went well. There was parts about our backgrounds that were similar. Like what? Like, just he's Persian, I'm Armenian, we're both Middle Eastern. You know, just there were these general cultural similarities that made me feel like, oh, it felt just comfortable.

Courtney may have felt these similarities pulling them together, but they had a lot of differences too. Where Hussein had grown up as one of the less well-off kids at Clovis High, Courtney's family was wealthy. Her dad was a successful businessman. Their family was close, the type that talk every day. And when Courtney told her parents about her new boyfriend, they were furious.

But there was only one major obstacle that seemed to really matter to Hussain. About three months into the relationship, he found out Courtney's real age. She was just 16, and he broke up with her.

2003 was an important year for Hussein. He was only in his early 20s, but he already had found a career that he liked and was good at, growing and selling marijuana. And when Hussein was fired from Mimi's Cafe, not long after he met Courtney, he dove headfirst into the world of weed, full-time. It was a great time to do it.

Remember, the laws that allowed dispensaries in California to thrive were also a boost to illegal operations like Hussein's. He set up his new business with two friends he'd known from high school. Ehsan Tusi and Kyle Handley. They didn't have a license for marijuana plants, so they had to find places to grow that were under the radar. Hussein's friend Jen would help out from time to time.

Where we grew the first time was in like an old dancing studio. A guy had built it for his ballerina wife. And so there was mirrors all over the walls. Hussein used the mirrors to bounce light back towards the plants. Yeah, he was really good at what he did. Avoiding suspicion from police was a 24-hour job. But hey, the pay was great.

I just remember them making a lot of money. And I remember being told where money was hidden. And me being like, oh, really? They're making it like that? Like, a lot of money. By now, Jen had more than just a friendly interest in Hussein's business.

They were dating, but a few months into their relationship, she started to hear rumors that Hussein was borrowing his ex-girlfriend's car, Courtney Shigarian's car. What happened was, is we basically broke up and we... lost contact for a couple of months. And then he came back into my life and he was dating someone else. And he just came back in my life because you needed to use my car. Hussein told her he needed the car for his business.

presumably to deliver weed or meet up with his growing partners. Using the car quickly turned back into a romantic relationship. I just remember him being a loser car, and I remember it not seeming everything that it was. Jen's suspicions about the car and Courtney were right on the money. But when Jen asked Usain outright, Is there something going on? He denied it. But with Courtney, things were different. With her, Hussein had no pretense about the fact that he had another girlfriend.

He had this way of like manipulating you into convincing you that this was normal. You know, this was like normal. Oh, I don't really like my girlfriend. I don't really care about my girlfriend. I, you know, I really care about you. Your parents don't understand you. I understand you. You know, all of these things you would start putting in your head. And I was at a place in my life where I just, I ate all that up.

Hossein would swing between these two women for the next six years, sometimes with both, sometimes with neither. He was always able to keep his two girlfriends siloed, each supporting him in... different ways. But even though they were being kept separate, they both noticed the same dynamic playing out between Hussein and his business partners. Hussein was in control.

Kyle Hanley was a follower, not a leader. Hossein is a leader, not a follower. Because Hossein is like the alpha dog. He's in the room. He is dictating everything. And so... Everything that I always knew of Kyle was he was just kind of a quiet guy. Jen and Courtney both thought Kyle was mild-mannered and that he did pretty much what he was told. Kyle and Hussein had known each other in high school, but...

They hadn't been friends. It was the third partner, Ehsan Tusi, who had suggested Kyle join the business. Ehsan and Hossein were very good friends. I would say they're best friends. Ehsan's family was also from Iran. They both spoke Farsi, and their families knew each other. Hussein and Ehsan had grown up together in Fresno, teenagers having fun. And now, as young men in their 20s, they were working together, socializing together, and taking risks together. Jen and Hussein's relationship was...

A lot of on-again, off-again. They were in an off-again phase on December 26, 2005, but still on good terms. On that day, Hussain and Ehsan were hanging out together, and they called her. They wanted to borrow her Chevy Silverado. Because they want to go to the casino and gamble. Jen said she had seen them earlier that day. She said they seemed like they were in a bad state of mind. She decided she didn't want them borrowing her truck. So I told him no, that's a horrible idea.

And so they're like, well, we're going to take Esson's car. And I said, that's an even worse idea. Jen didn't have time to argue. She was already running late for work. So she let them take her truck after all. When her shift ended that day, she tried to call them. No answer. It was the next morning, like at 5 a.m., I had like 100 missed calls on my phone and like 50 messages telling me about what had happened the night before, that they had been in an accident.

and that Eshon did not survive. You've been through one diet after another, maybe for years. You've counted calories, pushed through workouts, cut carbs, and still the weight came back. It's exhausting. You've been told it's about willpower, but really, it's about science. With Voy's weight loss program, we combine medication with expert support to help you reach your goals. We don't believe in one-size-fits-all solutions. Voy's medication is personalized based on what's right for you.

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Join over 100,000 people across the UK already seeing results with VOI at joinvoi.com slash podcast. Unsure if it's right for you? Check your eligibility today at joinvoi.com slash podcast. Treatments will only be prescribed if deemed appropriate. You've been through one diet after another, maybe for years. You've counted calories, pushed through workouts, cut carbs and still the weight came back. It's exhausting.

You've been told it's about willpower, but really, it's about science. With Voi's weight loss program, we combine medication with expert support to help you reach your goals. We don't believe in one size fits all solutions. Voice medication is personalised based on what's right for you. You'll have a full care team behind you from voice clinicians checking in on you. to a personal coach keeping you motivated. And with the VOI app, your team is always just a tap away, anytime, anywhere.

Join over 100,000 people across the UK already seeing results with VOI at joinvoi.com slash podcast. Unsure if it's right for you? Check your eligibility today at joinvoi.com slash podcast. Treatments will only be prescribed if deemed appropriate. Want a show? Because Atlanta has some extra pop. Feel the power of the dirt. And try to keep up with the beat of the ATM. The T-Mobile Home Run Derby, Monday, July 14th at 8 Eastern on ESPN.

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According to the police, this is how Ehsan died. On the 26th of December 2005, at 11.14 p.m., a California Highway Patrol officer was dispatched to the scene of a major injury traffic collision. An eyewitness said that a Chevy Silverado, driven by Hussein, was traveling at high speed, overtaking another vehicle as it went around a bend in the road. The witness heard screeching tires as the Chevy swerved, overcorrected, and left the road.

The car rolled multiple times down the embankment before coming to a halt and bursting into flames. Ehsan and Hussain were badly injured. Hussain had third and fourth degree burns. all over his body, and he shattered the bones in his left leg. Some of his toes had to be amputated. Ehsan was in the passenger seat, and as the truck rolled, he sustained blunt force injuries. He died less than 24 hours after the crash. When Hussein woke up, it was Jen who had to tell him. Ehsan's dead.

She said he was so distraught, he ripped the IV out of his arm. Courtney went to visit him too. I went to the hospital and saw him, and he was in a really bad state. He was in a really bad state. Essan's death wasn't the only thing Hussein had to face. There were legal consequences of the crash, too. He was tox-screened at the hospital. It showed that his blood alcohol level was over the legal limit.

and that he had been using cocaine. He was arrested and charged with vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated. This charge put Hussein's name in the system. His fingerprints and DNA collected in the aftermath of the crime were added to the state database. This would one day help police connect him with a future and much more brutal crime.

Soon after he was arrested, Jen posted bail for him, so he was able to go home to wait for his trial. She saw how different he was, how much the event had changed him. The accident was chaotic, emotional. Before that, there was more laughter. I can remember more laughter before the accident. Even though they were, for that moment at least, broken up, Jed hadn't stopped caring about Hussein.

By now, his mom had followed his dad back to Iran, and Jen felt like, since they weren't around, she had to take care of Hussein. He seemed like he needed it. He stopped talking as much. He stopped, you know, he wasn't smiling anymore. It was just a lot of depression. It looked like a lot of depression. Whether out of love...

or habit, or because of some kind of spell Hussein had over her, Jen stuck by his side. She went to extraordinary lengths to help him. Just a few months after the crash, Jen and Hussein got married. We were not married because we wanted to be married. I was trying to ensure that he stayed here in the country, but that didn't work either. Jen had hoped that marriage would protect Hussein from being deported as a result of his manslaughter charges. In the end, she shouldn't have bothered.

Hossein was scheduled to appear in court in early 2007, but he didn't show. Jen knew exactly where he was. He'd fled to Iran. I was really mad. I was really mad. I had a bail bond in my name. I kind of felt betrayed. I believe I showed him a lot of loyalty he did not especially deserve. Yeah, I did. Hussein had taken what he needed from her, and then he left her behind to face the consequences of his actions. Jen was beyond disappointed, but in some ways, not surprised.

I think he has a hard time dealing with conflict. Anytime any kind of conflict arises in his life, he runs. He gets up and he leaves. He runs, he leaves the room. I just wanted him to deal with it and face it head on. I thought it would be healing for him if he would do that. Hossein had escaped, but it didn't last.

He wasn't interested in living out his days in Iran. He wanted to come back, and there always seemed to be someone willing to help him, even if it was at great personal risk to themselves. This time... It was Courtney. After over a year in exile, Hussein was able to sneak back into the United States using Courtney's cousin's passport. He stayed out of California, hiding in Washington state.

He grew weed again, this time in the suburbs of Seattle. Courtney would go up and spend weekends with him, and their relationship grew more serious. But in December of 2008, three years after the crash, he was caught and finally extradited to California to face the charges he'd tried to run from. If you think that by now Hussein has burned all his bridges with the people who cared about him, you'd be wrong. When Hussein's case went to court, the judge had eight...

teen letters of support from Hussein's family and friends. Courtney wrote one, of course. His siblings wrote one, saying that Hussein was, quote, heartbroken by the death of his son. Hussein wrote one for himself, describing his total depression in the months after the crash. Even Jen, despite all that Hussein had put her through, and the fact that their romantic relationship was by now...

truly over for good. She wrote a letter in support of him. It's worth mentioning, not everyone thought Hussein deserved a second chance. Essan Tusi's brother called him a, quote, con man and a psychopath who gamed the system by exaggerating his grief over Essan's death, hoping that sympathy might equal leniency. In court, Hussein faced two charges, one for vehicular manslaughter and one for running away. And the judge did seem to give him leniency.

He was given a chance to start again, a suspended sentence and five years probation. He had to attend rehab sessions, but he had no jail time. He and Courtney... We're free to move on with our life together. I'm like, okay, so now we've learned our lesson. He's gonna, you know, clean his life up. He's gonna move on. Things are gonna get better.

In June 2010, as his legal troubles were fading into the rearview mirror, they got married. The bride was 24, the groom was 32. It wasn't a romantic wedding. In fact, it was technically illegal. Hossein was still married. He didn't file for divorce from Jen until November that year, and the ceremony was nothing fancy. a courthouse wedding near LAX. Courtney didn't tell her parents because she knew they wouldn't approve. He had convinced me.

And I believed at the time that he was the only one that cared about me. He's the only one that loved me. And I just felt like I couldn't live without him. Hussein moved into a house in Irvine, a town just inland from Newport Beach, and split his time between their and Courtney's apartment nearby.

he threw himself back into growing and selling weed with his old business partner, Kyle Handley. Courtney's world shrank. Now it could fit only two things. Law school. and Hussain. She barely spoke to her family, and her life revolved around making her new husband happy. But Courtney started to see that Somewhere in the aftermath of the accident and years on the run, Hossein had changed. Now that they spent more time together than ever before, she could see that he was darker.

More serious and behaving erratically. Six months after they got married, Courtney called Irvine police to the house. She said she'd been arguing with Hussein. and he'd grabbed her by the arm, hard. She told police that he'd been acting strangely and that she wanted them to do a 5150, an involuntary detention for someone in the midst of a mental health emergency. Irvine PD comes. They come to the house. I show them all the bruises on my arm.

Officers are talking to him. They ask him, you know, are you a danger to yourself? Are you a danger to anyone else? You know, they go through all of the questions. No, no, no. Oh, he says, maybe I like pulled my wife a little too hard, you know.

kind of like halfway admits it. And so they look at me and they said, well, ma'am, are you going to press charges? Now he's in earshot. He's listening to this entire conversation. And I was like, well, no, but can't you just take him? Cause he's, you know, he's, he's losing it. The police report said that Hussein was irrational and hard to follow. The officer on scene said that Hussein seemed to be unaware of hurting Courtney at all, saying, did I do that?

when asked. The report says that he ranted about his struggles with the recent five-year anniversary of losing Essan, about his time in the Marines, about arguments with friends. According to the report, he smelled like marijuana and alcohol, and he wasn't making a lot of sense. But it wasn't enough to detain him, unless Courtney pressed charges, which she said she didn't want to do.

So they're like, no, well, if you're going to press charges and there's nothing for us to do, they leave. And he tells me, I'll never forget this. He's like, come sit on the stairs right next to me. I'm like, OK. And he says. I just want you to know that your friends just walked out the door. I could kill you right now. And they let me do it. Nothing anyone's going to do about it.

Hussein never faced charges for domestic abuse. But the police reports verify something that Courtney says was happening more and more. Hussein acting unpredictably.

Then, by the fall of 2012, Courtney said there were three strange moments all close together. The first was in September, when she found Hussain and Kyle in the garage one day. playing with a blowtorch. The next was a couple of weeks later. Courtney was woken up by the police in the middle of the night. They'd seen her car. a Chevy Tahoe, speeding through Newport Beach, doing 70 in a 55. After a chase, the car was dumped on Balboa Island, which is a residential community in Newport Harbor.

Courtney told the officer that Hussein was using that car, but when they asked for his cell phone number, she stopped answering questions. Courtney got the full story from Hussein when he got home a few hours later. He was driving a car that was, it was a car that was undermining him, but it was like his car that he would always drive. A gray, dark gray Chevy Tahoe. And he...

And supposedly, according to him, he had been drinking and they were going to pull, you know, the police were going to pull him over. And he gets into basically a high speed chase and flees. And, you know, drives all throughout Newport Beach, parks his car on the Balboa Island and jumps into the water. And, you know, law enforcement's looking for him. Did he come home sopping wet to you? He did.

So things were just getting more and more intense. He was getting more clicked in and somber and kind of scary and secretive and just intense. Hossein swam 300 feet to cross the channel separating Balboa Island from the mainland in the early hours of September 26th. The car he'd abandoned. was taken to the police impound lot. Courtney's birthday was a few days later, on October 1st, and that was the third strange thing. Hussain said he wouldn't be around that night.

He wouldn't say why. So he took her out a few days earlier to celebrate. Courtney now has a pretty good idea of what Hossein was busy doing on her birthday. That was the night.

of the kidnapping. The night that Mary Barnes and her roommate Michael were taken from their home and driven to the desert. But at the time, Courtney got on with her week, thinking everything was normal. until the Saturday after the attack. I mean, I really didn't see him the rest of that week until October 6th when I...

You know, I went to the gym in the morning, and then when I got back, Hussein was like, you know, Kyle's not answering his phone. I need to go to his house. Let me borrow your car, because at this point we have one car, because his car is in the impound, you know, in police custody. October 6th. That was the day that Kyle Handley was officially arrested in connection to the case. When Hussein went to his house, all he would have seen was a pink notice on the door saying, warrant and nobody home.

When he came back, Courtney noticed that Hussein was rattled. He starts destroying, you know, anything in the house that had anything to do with him, a pair of shoes, you know, paperwork, everything. And he's... I mean, totally just not the cool, calm, collected person that he was. And then when he found out what Kyle's charges were, I mean, it intensified like.

times a hundred. I mean, he was like, I got to get out of here. I got to get out of here. And it was almost like he felt bad for himself. Like it was just, it was just all about him. Hussein left the house, left Kyle Handley in custody and fled. just as he had before. On October 14th, he boarded a plane to Iran. Hossein Nairi, the man given a thousand second chances, had finally blown through them all.

With Jen, with Courtney, with the law. And just like that, he was gone. And Newport Beach Police had no idea. Detective Ryan Peters leading the investigation into the kidnapping of Mary Barnes and Michael got a match on DNA found on a glove inside the truck used for the crime. The DNA matched a vehicular manslaughter case out in Fresno back in 2005. Hossein Nayeri.

Peters discovered that the same name had been found on insurance documents inside a Chevy Tahoe used in a recent high-speed chase in Newport Beach. All of this had allowed him to get a warrant to track Nayeri's whereabouts. And that's what he thought he was doing through Nayeri's cell phone, which showed that Hussein Nayeri was not moving. and that he was close, staying at Courtney Shigarian's apartment.

i realize his phone's not moving so stuck in this apartment in orange county and not leaving where my team is telling me courtney's constantly going to and from school to and from picking up food like he's she's doing everything for him which is indicative of like, hey, I don't want to be seen out in public. I don't want to be arrested. Like, you go do everything for me. That's kind of normal for a criminal. This process to find Nayeri had taken months. But as Detective Peters circled closer...

and closer to where his suspect should have been, he had no idea that he was actually over 7,000 miles away. So...

While the police waited for a sign of Nayeri at the apartment that seemed to never come, they thought about other ways they could get close to him. Deputy District Attorney Matt Murphy said police were trying to put pressure on the people in Nayeri's inner circle, hoping that one of them would break. They started with Kyle Handley, who was still on the hook as the sole person charged with the crime.

I'm thinking, this guy's going to be easy. He's, you know, this guy's soft. He's going to, he's immediately going to want to. roll on everybody in exchange for his own freedom. And instead, he did not want to participate. He didn't want to help. He didn't want to roll on anybody. So we are at a dead end. OK. So the police turned their attention to Courtney. and they realize she knows a lot more than she's letting on. You start to wonder, is this woman totally innocent?

When they bring Courtney in for questioning, they soon discover two things. One, that Nayeri is long gone. And two, that Courtney might be their only chance to bring him to justice. If he doesn't drag her under with him. I'm looking at Courtney as a co-conspirator who's going to do life in prison for this.

she fully participated in this and she wasn't hesitant hesitant to say she wasn't like she was admitting things that made her culpable he had me buy meat one time and i asked why and he said that He got something that was poisonous for dogs. Devil in the Desert is a production of ABC Audio, ABC News Studios in 2020. Hosted by me, Matt Gutman, this series was produced by Madeline Wood, Amy Padula, and Kiara Powell.

Our supervising producer is Susie Liu. Music and mixing by Evan Viola. Special thanks to Liz Alessi, Katie Dendas, Janice Johnston, Eamon McNiff, Jake Lefferman, Katie Muldowney, and Michelle Margulies. Josh Cohan is our director of podcast programming. Laura Mayer is our executive producer. There's probably one really true thing about restaurants. You are never alone. FX presents the bear. How do we keep this place open? We're going to figure it out. I'm fired up, ready to go. Showtime.

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