SF Jury Convicts Rideshare Rapist, Defendant Faces Century-Plus Prison Term

The corner of Howard and Second streets in South of Market was where he worked most often, circling the nightclub strip in a car affixed with Uber and Lyft stickers, waiting for a woman to step off the curb alone and mistake his vehicle for the ride she had ordered. After a 12-week trial, a San Francisco jury on Friday convicted Orlando Vilchez Lazo, 44, on 11 felony counts in one of the city's most closely watched sexual assault prosecutions in years. He faces more than 100 years to life in state prison, with sentencing scheduled for late April.

The jury found Vilchez Lazo guilty of 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 four survivors were each 21 or 22 years old when they were attacked, and every assault followed the same basic script: he would pull to the curb near a bar or nightclub, sometimes announcing "Uber, Uber," and a woman who had just requested a legitimate driver would step in.

The first known attack happened in November 2013, when a victim left Virgil's Sea Room in the Mission and got into his vehicle. She fell asleep in the car, woke in a parking lot surrounded by warehouses, and was raped. Five years passed before the next reported incident, then three more assaults followed in rapid succession through mid-2018. In May of that year, a woman ordered a rideshare near Howard and Second Street after leaving a SOMA club. Vilchez Lazo pulled up with a rideshare decal, confirmed he was her driver, and drove her not home but to Mansell Street, where he took her phone so she could not call for help and raped her in the backseat at knifepoint. Phones confiscated from multiple victims were later recovered at his San Mateo County residence.

DNA evidence collected across the cases ultimately connected them. District Attorney Brooke Jenkins credited a joint SFPD-DA task force, assembled in 2018, with breaking the case open. In July of that year, undercover surveillance officers noticed a car with a rideshare sticker circling the Howard and Second streets area for more than an hour without picking up any fares. Officers stopped it, confirmed the match, and Vilchez Lazo was arrested. He has been in custody since.

"Justice has finally been served," Jenkins said in a statement Friday. "I would like to thank the survivors for their courage and trust in my office to get them justice." Assistant District Attorney Michele Brass, who led the trial, credited the survivors directly: "These four survivors showed overwhelming courage and strength by coming to testify after all of these years and face the man that committed such horrendous acts."

The case laid bare how little infrastructure stands between a rideshare passenger and someone impersonating one. Vilchez Lazo's primary tool was a sticker, the same decal legitimate drivers display. Both Uber and Lyft have since built in-app safety features, including driver photo verification, license plate display, and PIN-matching systems, but those tools only protect passengers who check them before opening the door. Advocates and city officials say the conviction should now drive concrete operational changes: expanded late-night police patrols in the SOMA nightlife corridor, better-lit designated pickup zones on Howard and Folsom streets, and a real-time reporting protocol requiring platforms to notify SFPD when a driver account receives an assault complaint, rather than routing those reports through standard customer service queues.

Before getting into any rideshare tonight: open the app and confirm the driver's name, photo, car color, and license plate before touching the door handle. Use the app's "Share your trip status" feature to send a live tracking link to a trusted contact. If anything does not match, step back, cancel the ride, and request a new one. Anyone who suspects their driver is not who the app says should call 911; for non-emergency concerns, SFPD can be reached at 415-553-0123.

Survivors of sexual assault in San Francisco can reach SF Women Against Rape at 415-647-7273, available 24 hours a day. The National Sexual Assault Hotline operated by RAINN is available at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673). The San Francisco District Attorney's Victim Services Division also connects survivors with case advocates and legal support.

Vilchez Lazo, a Peruvian national, had been living in San Mateo County at the time of his 2018 arrest. The trial was delayed for years by defense challenges over the admissibility of DNA evidence and the complexity of reconstructing five years of attacks across multiple victims. His formal sentencing in late April will mark the legal endpoint of a case that four women waited more than eight years to see reach a verdict.