On Friday, a Denver judge sentenced a former driver of the RIT share to 290 years to life after officers of Justice said that he kidnapped a dozen women for four years by wrongly posing as the driver they asked.
The man, John Pastor-Mendoza, was sentenced at the end of October on 30 charges with regard to the kidnapping, attempted sexual violence and sexual violence of women between 2018 and 2022.
Mr Pastor-Mendoza, 43, who lived in Denver, wrongly claimed to be the driver for women who used an app for sharing journeys and pick them up outside the city center and clubs.
The women on which he pointed lay down and did not know that, although Mr Pastor-Mendoza was a driver for Lyft, he was not the right driver who was assigned to pick them up, the authorities said.
Lyft said there were no reports of these journeys and that Mr Pastor-Mendoza probably made the journeys of the books, the Washington Post reported. Lyft did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.
According to John Walsh, the public prosecutor in Denver, Mr Pastor-Mendoza would sexually abuse the women as soon as they got into his car or bring them to another location and attack them there.
“Pastor-Mendoza succeeded the victim of 12 women in a calculated, cruel and despicable series of crimes for four years,” said Mr. Walsh in a press release. He called the punishment, by Judge Karen Brody of the District of Denver, “completely appropriate.”
“We must all be grateful for the courage of the victims of Pastor-Mendoza, who emerged and testified during the process to ensure that Pastor-Mendoza no longer gets the chance to harm our community,” Mr Walsh added.
Mr Pastor-Mendoza was convicted of kidnapping the 12 women, the sexual abuse of two of them, in an attempt to attack seven of them and theft sexually. Mr Pastor-Mendoza maintained his innocence on Friday” According to a spokeswoman for the office of the public prosecutor.
When Mr Pastor-Mendoza was charged in October 2022, the Denver police announced that DNA certificate of at least three of the victims was a match for Mr Pastor-Mendoza.
Rachel Perry, one of the women attacked by Mr Pastor-Mendoza, said her fight-or-flight reaction started when she realized that he was not driving her intended destination in March 2019, according to a press release from November.
“We are strong, we have fought and we fought hard,” Mrs. Perry told reporters in addition to seven other victims in the courthouse on Friday, reported the Kusa television station. “I survived a monster. We all did that. And today I have the feeling that we have received justice. '
