How Uber’s technology helped crack ride-share rape
WEST CHESTER >> It was the Uber ride that put the woman from Phoenixville in harm’s way, the night she came from from a night at the Valley Forge Casino and was sexually assaulted by her driver.
But it was the Uber technology that began the process of uncovering what happened to her, helping to set the foundation for the conviction last week of the man who committed the assault.
Prosecutors in the trial of Ahmed Mostafa Elgaafary, the Uber driver who picked the then-21-year-old woman up at the casino in Upper Merion and sometime later had sex with her while she was unconscious in the back of his SUV, used information gained from the Uber application on a witness’s smart phone and data accumulated by the ride sharing service itself to build its case.
Coupled with the woman’s own testimony that “something just didn’t feel right” when she woke up the morning after the ride home and witnesses who corroborated parts of her story, as well as damning forensic evidence, Elgaafary — a 27-year-old former Temple University student and father of one who had been an Uber driver for four months when the incident occurred — was found guilty by a Common Pleas jury on Thursday.
The jury of eight women and four men convicted him of rape of an unconscious person, sexual assault, and indecent assault. He was taken into custody following the verdict and sent to Chester County Prison to await sentencing later this year. He faces a possible maximum sentence on the rape charge of 10 to 20 years in state prison, and later deportation to his native Egypt.
Ride sharing services such as Uber and Lyft have been struggling to deal with accusations that female passengers are the targets of unwanted attention by their drivers, or in more extreme cases, the victims of attacks. The situations can range from ones in which the passengers feel uncomfortable with comments made to them by drivers about their appearance or directly personal questions about their marital status to outright physical or sexual assaults.
A CNN television investigation in 2018 reported that at it had found at least 103 Uber drivers in the U.S. who had been accused of sexually assaulting or abusing their passengers in the past four years. At least 31 drivers have been convicted for crimes ranging from forcible touching and false imprisonment to rape, and dozens of criminal and civil cases are pending, CNN found.
Civil attorney Shanin Specter of the Philadelphia law firm of Kline & Specter, whose his firm had begun representing some clients in cases involving ride sharing services, speculated however that Uber and Lyft drivers might be less likely to act inappropriately because they are more often tracked by the company through its digital applications and can thus face scrutiny through their electronic footprints — exactly as what happened in Elgaafary’s case.
According to testimony at the four-day trial before Judge Patrick Carmody, the woman had gone to the casino complex in Upper Merion with her mother and step-father, both of whom were regulars there, the evening of Feb. 9, 2018. They had dinner and met up with a friend of her mother’s, a man described as a “high roller” at the casino. The woman was drinking alcohol, and had several glasses of wine and mixed drinks during the several hours she was there.
Sometime after 2 a.m. the next morning, a female friend of the high roller used his Uber account to order a ride home for herself. But when she saw that the younger woman was unsteady on her feet and appeared intoxicated, she decided to give the ride over to her. Information from the casino’s security cameras and the Uber data itself put the time she got into Elgaafary’s GMC Yukon at 2:21 a.m.
The woman, a graduate of Great Valley High School whose name is being withheld by the Daily
Local News because of the nature of the crime, testified on Tuesday that she woke up around 11 a.m. that day, not knowing how she had gotten home or into bed and having a “gut feeling” that something wrong had occurred. She looked for her phone but could not find it and, later, told her parents of her uneasiness. She and her mother went to an AT&T phone store, got a replacement phone, and called her mother’s gambler friend to ask what had happened.
The man told her of the Uber ride, and sent her the information from his account. It was that detail that made her realize that her suspicions had been right: something was amiss.
The account information showed that her ride had begun at 2:21 a.m., but had not ended until 3:14 a.m., and at a house on her street with a different address than hers. That 53-minute trip took far longer than a ride from the casino to her house just outside Phoenixville in Charlestown should have taken — normally around 15 minutes.
And the path that the driver had taken was odd, veering off for a long loop in Upper Providence, Montgomery County, near Audubon. A GPS route shoes the shortest, quickest trip from the casino to her home through Valley Forge Park on Route 23.
The woman took her parents’ advice and went to first Phoenixville Hospital and ultimately to Pottsown Hospital, for a sexual assault examination, even though she still had no clear memory of what had occurred the night before. The exam found the presence of DNA evidence that was sent to the state police crime lab for analysis.
Next, a trooper who was assigned to the case, Amos
Ride sharing services such as Uber and Lyft have been struggling to deal with accusations that female passengers are the targets of unwanted attention by their drivers, or in more extreme cases, the victims of attacks.
Glick, was able to track down the Uber driver, Elgaafary, and interview him on Feb. 14.
Elgaafary told the trooper that the woman had been heavily intoxicated on the ride, and that he had to stop twice to allow her to throw up. Once, he said, she tried to exit the car while he was driving on Route 422 just outside Valley Forge. He even showed Glick photographs of the woman lying on the back seat in her own vomit.
When he was asked, then and in a later interview, the driver denied having had any sexual contact with the woman whatsoever. He even allowed them to take a swab of his DNA for testing.
Among the witnesses that were called by Assistant District Attorneys Vince Cocco and Alexis Shaw was Trenton Leuie, an executive with Uber’s Law Enforcement Response Team, the group that handles requests for information from investigators like Glick. What he showed the jury was the enormous amount of data that the company had recording Elgaafary’s ride with the woman that night.
Through the application that Uber drivers — who are technically independent contractors and not Uber employees — are required to install on their smartphones, the company can track where the phone is every two seconds that it is activated. It showed the longitude and latitude of Elgaafary’s phone, the time, and the speed at which the phone (and by extension, the car it was in) was traveling. Through that, the prosecution, showed the jurors that Elgaafary had stoped not twice but three times on the ride that night: once for 3 minutes and 41 seconds on Route 422; once for 3 minutes and 6 seconds in Schuylkill; and lastly in her development, for close to 15 minutes.
Leuie was also able to share with the jurors the photos of the woman, seemingly unconscious and sick, that Elgaafary had sent the company in an attempt to claim a $150 “cleaning fee” for his SUV. He wrote about “the mess” the woman had caused, “all over” his backseat. By the time he filed for the cleaning fee, Glick had begun contacting the company about the ride and Elgaafary’s account with the company was suspended.
Ultimately, the DNA that the state police had collected from the woman and Elgaafary showed that he had had sexual intercourse with her that night while she was in his car.
When Elgaafary testified at the trial, he maintained that the woman had consented to having sex with him, and had even initiated it — lifting up her skirt and inviting him into the back seat. But the image of her passed out in the Yukon, vomit smeared on her face, an image contained in Uber’s files, bolstered the prosecution’s case that she was too intoxicated to consent to any sex that night, and that Elgaafary knew it.
The jury took about 2 1/2 hours to come back with its verdict of guilty on all counts.