When rideshare apps were still in their relative infancy, Orlando Vilchez Lazo was driving around San Francisco posing as a driver to pick up women coming out of bars and nightclubs.
He’d get them in the car and drive them to secluded locations and sexually assault them, and repeated the act numerous times for years.
His first attack was in 2013, but in 2018, one of his victims escaped, and soon after, Lazo was taken into custody.
On Monday, a judge in San Francisco sentenced Lazo to six life terms in prison, amounting to 150 years, after he was convicted of two counts of kidnapping with intent to commit rape, four counts of kidnapping, four counts of rape by force or fear and two counts of sexual penetration with a foreign object, according to a news release from the San Francisco County district attorney.
“Justice has been served for these courageous victims,” Dist. Atty. Brooke Jenkins said in a statement. “This sentence reflects the gravity and heinousness of Mr. Vilchez Lazo’s crimes and holds him accountable for the pain he has caused. It also ensures that his reign of terror on our community permanently ends.”
According to prosecutors, the first assault occurred in 2013, when Lazo picked up a 21-year-old college student leaving a Mission District bar and took her to an abandoned industrial area and raped her. The rape was a cold case until a DNA sample was collected from another incident in 2018, in which Lazo raped a 22-year-old woman. He raped two more women that same year, between May and June, and was finally arrested that July.
“These women were remarkable in calling upon a level of bravery that no person should ever have to experience,” Assistant Dist. Atty. Michele Brass said in the release, referring to the women coming forward to help convict Lazo. “They showed grace, courage, and strength during this excruciatingly long process. I hope these verdicts and this sentence provide them with some sense of closure and peace.”
Before his arrest, Lazo had been a Lyft driver. At the time, the company was the up-and-coming rideshare company trying to compete with Uber in California, and background checks at the time for both companies were not considered top-tier.
Vilchez Lazo is an undocumented immigrant from Peru and applied to drive for Lyft and passed its background check despite his immigration status. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency said that Vilchez Lazo was living in the United States illegally.
Lyft said that Vilchez Lazo “fraudulently represented himself” in order to work as a driver on its platform, according to the Associated Press. He was deactivated as a driver shortly after his arrest in 2018.
ICE said it plans to deport Vilchez Lazo to Peru if he’s ever released from custody.
The post San Francisco’s ‘rideshare rapist’ sentenced to 150 years in prison appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
