A San Francisco jury found Orlando Vilchez Lazo, a 44-year-old Peruvian national living in the United States illegally, guilty on 11 felony counts after a 12-week trial for kidnapping and sexually assaulting women he lured into his car by posing as their Uber or Lyft driver. San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins announced the verdict Friday, saying Vilchez Lazo faces a sentence of 100 years to life in prison.
The convictions include two counts of kidnapping with intent to commit rape, three counts of kidnapping, four counts of rape by force or fear, and two counts of sexual penetration with a foreign object. The crimes spanned from 2013 to 2018. Vilchez Lazo will be sentenced at the end of April, though the exact date has not been set.
The case is a grim example of what happens when immigration enforcement fails and a predator is free to operate for years in a major American city. Vilchez Lazo was in the country illegally the entire time he carried out these attacks, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He exploited the trust women placed in rideshare platforms to isolate, threaten, and assault them.
The scheme was methodical. Vilchez Lazo displayed rideshare stickers from both Lyft and Uber on his car, then waited outside bars and nightclubs in San Francisco for women looking for rides home. Once a woman got in, he took her phone so she could not call for help, then drove her to a remote location.
The first reported assault occurred in 2013. A 21-year-old college student leaving a bar in the Mission District got into what she believed was her rideshare. Vilchez Lazo drove her to an abandoned industrial area, where, according to the San Francisco District Attorney's office, he raped her. Prosecutors said he used a sharp object during that attack and told the woman, "This can be easy or this can be violent."
That case went cold for years. Then in February 2018, Vilchez Lazo used the same strategy on a 22-year-old woman leaving a nightclub in the South of Market neighborhood. He picked her up, and a friend who was with her got out of the vehicle less than a block away after Vilchez Lazo pulled over and told the friend to exit. He then drove the woman to Mansell Street and raped her.
That same May, another 22-year-old woman was targeted in the same neighborhood and taken to Mansell Street. In June, a 21-year-old woman who had ordered a rideshare near Howard and Second Street became his next victim. Prosecutors said he targeted four women in total between 2013 and 2018 by pretending to be their rideshare driver.
Jenkins said DNA evidence helped investigators connect Vilchez Lazo to the series of assaults. Some victims identified him in a lineup. And when investigators searched his residence, they found the phones he had confiscated from the women.
Jenkins described the evidence tying him to the crimes:
"Multiple phones... that he took from them so that they could not call for help were found in his residence, so there were multiple things tying him to these crimes."
The break in the case came about a month after the June assault. An undercover surveillance team from the San Francisco Police Department spotted a car matching descriptions from the earlier rapes. The vehicle had a rideshare sticker. Officers pulled it over, identified Vilchez Lazo, and arrested him.
The surveillance team had observed the car circling near Howard and Second Street for over an hour without picking up any fares, a detail that underscored how deliberately Vilchez Lazo hunted for victims.
ICE said Vilchez Lazo is from Peru and was living in the United States illegally when he committed the crimes. Uber stated he never drove for the company. Lyft confirmed he had been a driver on their platform but said he lied about his immigration status when he applied.
That detail should trouble anyone who uses rideshare services. A man who could not legally be in this country managed to get hired by a major transportation platform by lying on his application. He then used the company's branding to lure women into his car. The system that was supposed to vet drivers failed at the most basic level, confirming whether the applicant was lawfully present in the country.
The broader pattern is familiar. Across the country, illegal immigrants have been charged with serious violent crimes that might never have occurred had immigration laws been enforced. Every case like this represents a preventable tragedy, a crime committed by someone who should not have been here in the first place.
Jenkins praised the women who testified, noting the defense subjected them to aggressive cross-examination:
"The defense put them through unimaginable amounts of questioning, accusing them of horrific things like consenting to this conduct or seeking for it to happen."
She added that the case illustrated what victims endure in the criminal justice system and said her office works every day to help them tell their stories. The district attorney also pointed to the wider impact of Vilchez Lazo's crimes on public safety and women's sense of security in San Francisco.
Jenkins noted the fear his actions caused across the city, asking how many women had to change their behavior because of one predator posing as a rideshare driver:
"How many women had to be reminded at that time to be sure to check license plates when they were getting ready to enter a rideshare? That they didn't say their name, but rather, wait for the driver to say their names?"
She said the case forced rideshare companies to change their practices. "This conduct led to so many changes and so much fear stoked in women who were simply trying to get home safely," Jenkins stated.
The political debate over sanctuary policies and immigration enforcement has only intensified in recent years. In cities like San Francisco, local officials have clashed with ICE over enforcement priorities, often shielding illegal immigrants from federal authorities. Cases like Vilchez Lazo's raise an uncomfortable question for those officials: how many of these crimes could have been prevented by cooperation with immigration enforcement?
If sentenced to the maximum, Vilchez Lazo will spend the rest of his life in prison. Jenkins called the verdict justice finally served. For the women he attacked, and for a city that had to reckon with the fear he created, the conviction is long overdue.
But a guilty verdict after years of suffering does not erase the failures that allowed this to happen. An illegal immigrant lied his way onto a rideshare platform, preyed on women for five years, and operated freely in a city that has made a political identity out of resisting immigration enforcement. The debate over sanctuary policies and public safety is not abstract. It has real victims, and four of them just had to relive the worst moments of their lives in a courtroom to get a measure of justice.
Meanwhile, some in Congress continue to push for policies that would make enforcement even harder. Proposals to compensate illegal immigrants targeted by ICE send exactly the wrong signal when cases like this one demonstrate the cost of lax enforcement in human terms.
Four women trusted a system, rideshare safety, immigration law, the basic order of a major American city, and every layer of that system let them down. The jury did its job. The question is whether anyone upstream will do theirs.
