Meet Amanda Knox's Rocker Fiance Colin Sutherland

They have known each other since middle school.

ByABC News
February 12, 2015, 1:21 PM

— -- Amanda Knox got an early Valentine's Day present this year, as her father confirmed to ABC News she is engaged to be married.

Knox's fiance is Colin Sutherland, a friend she has known since middle school in Washington State.

They were pictured together last summer when Knox, now 27, was living in New York for a few months. Sutherland is a musician who lived in Brooklyn at the time.

They were engaged Feb. 3, her father said. Knox lives in Seattle and it is unclear whether Sutherland has moved back to the state.

Sutherland, now 27, was listed as a 2009 graduate of Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York.

Postings by one of the college theater companies shows him as a member in his senior year, and one of the school's Facebook pages that highlights alumni work posted his band's music video.

His band, The Johnny Pumps, is based in New York and is described as a mix of rock, "impure metal, and it's cut with a punk edge that will make you want to dance."

He is also part of a group called The Haunted Life, which plans to travel the country playing music and telling ghost stories with their first scheduled stops in Ohio and Kentucky.

According to his introduction on the group's site, he has "lived and played music in parts of the US, France, and Nepal."

For the time being, Knox appears to have settled back into her hometown of Seattle. She graduated from the University of Washington in June.

The legal saga surrounding the 2007 murder of her roommate while she was studying abroad continues in Italy next month.

Knox was initially convicted by an Italian court of killing Meredith Kercher but that decision was overturned on appeal in October 2011 after she had spent four years in prison. She was then reconvicted last year and an appeal of the appeal will begin next month.

Knox has previously told ABC News that while she maintains her innocence, she will not be traveling to Italy for the new appeal because if found guilty, she would then be sent back to jail.

"It really hit me like a train," she said on “Good Morning America” in January 2014. "I did not expect this to happen. I really expected so much better from the Italian justice system. They found me innocent once before.

"I will never go willingly back to the place where … I’m going to fight this to the very end. It’s not right and it’s not fair," she said.

ABC News' Nikki Batiste contributed to this report.