Uber driver guilty in rape case
WEST CHESTER >> A Chester County Court jury hearing the case of an Uber driver accused of raping a woman he had picked up for a ride at the Valley Forge Casino found him guilty on all charges Thursday.
The jury of eight women and four men deliberated about 2½ hours before returning with the verdict to a packed courtroom in the Chester County Justice Center around 2:45 p.m.
One of the jurors, a young woman with brown hair, smiled at the victim as she took her place in the jury box before the verdict was announced.
The defendant, Ahmed Mostafa Elgaafary, showed no reaction to the verdict as the forewoman read it in open court. His family members, gathered in the courtroom behind him, also stayed silent.
Elgaafary was found guilty on counts of rape of an unconscious person, sexual assault and two counts of indecent assault, one dealing with an unconscious person.
Common Pleas Court Judge Patrick Carmody, who presided over the fourday long trial, revoked Elgaafary’s bail upon the request of the lead prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney
Vince Cocco.
Citing the guilty verdict on the charge of rape, Carmody said the jury had determined he was a “danger to the community. I cannot in good faith allow you to be out working as an Uber driver.”
Elgaafary had actually had his Uber account suspended after he was initially
accused off the assault in February 2018.
He will be held in Chester County Prison pending bail.
The case pitted the woman’s account of waking up after a night on the town at the casino with family members and having a “bad gut feeling” that something bad had happened to her on the way home that she could not remember, with Elgaafary’s assertion that the woman had consented to having sex with him after meeting him only a few minutes before.
The panel of eight women and four men got the case from Carmody after hearing about 70 minutes of closing arguments from attorneys for the two sides.
Cocco, in his presentation to the jury, pointed to the woman’s high level of intoxication as evidence that she was incapable of knowing what was happening to
her that night or being legally able to give consent to have sex with Elgaafary. She had testified that she had been drinking – several glasses of wine and mixed drinks – for some hours before leaving the casino af
ter the bars there had closed.
As illustration, he showed the jury a photo that Elgaafary had taken of the woman that night, lying prone with her eyes closed and traces of vomit on her face, a photo he used to try to get a cleaning fee from Uber after her ride had ended. When the photograph flashed on the video screen in the courtroom, the woman, who had been sitting in the front row of seats, got up and left the courtroom in distress. She returned a few moments later after calming down.
“He knew she was too intoxicated to make any reasonable judgment about anything” that night, Cocco said of Elgaafary, who listened stoically to the accusations against him. “He knew she was vulnerable, and he knew she was alone and in his car, and he could do what he wanted.”
But defense attorney Melissa McCafferty of West Chester, representing Elgaafary, told the jury that what had occurred between the two of them was not criminal, but rather a drunken act by a woman who was upset about an ex-boyfriend.
“She seduced him,” McCafferty said as the woman listened. “She initiated the sexual encounter and then tried to get him to come into her house with her. Just because (she) doesn’t remember the sex doesn’t mean she wasn’t conscious.”
Elgaafary, 27, of Lansdale, a father of one, now faces a likely term in state prison, followed by deportation to his native Egypt after completing his sentence.
Ride-sharing services such as Uber and Lyft have been struggling to deal with accusations from female passengers across the country that they are 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.
It is believed that Elgaafary’s case is the first Uber-related sexual assault in Chester County.
The incident occurred in the early morning hours of Feb. 10, 2018, after the woman had gone to the casino complex in Upper Merion with her mother and step-father for a night on the town. Her parents left her at the Center Bar, and around 2:15 a.m. a friend helped her contact Uber for a ride home.
The woman, in her testimony, said that when she woke up around 11 a.m. the next morning she could not remember how she got home to her bedroom. She said that she panicked and began crying.
“I had a real bad gut feeling,” she testified. “I did not feel OK. Something just didn’t feel right in my mind and my body. It just didn’t feel right.”
State Police Trooper Amos Glick, who interviewed the woman at Pottstown Hospital, where she went for a sexual assault exam, was able to track Uber’s records and identify Elgaafary as her driver. He was interviewed, but denied having had any sexual contact with her. He said she was heavily intoxicated and had thrown up twice on the trip — once trying to get out of his SUV while they were driving on Route 422.
That claim was a central part of Cocco’s argument asserting Elgaafary’s guilt in the case.
“The same guy who had a track record of lies now wants you to believe what he told you in his testimony was the truth,” Cocco told the jurors. “He had carte blanche to make up whatever he wanted” because he knew how intoxicated the woman was. “But he chose to tell the wrong story.”
Cocco, who prosecuted the case with Assistant District Attorney Alexis Shaw, reminded the panel that state police were able to match DNA evidence that had been collected during the woman’s examination with Elgaafary’s sample, establishing that he had had sex with her.
“He told lie after lie after lie,” he said. “But we know it happened.”
The woman, a 23-yearold graduate of Great Valley High School, “should have been safe when she got into the back of that Uber that night,” Cocco said. “but she wasn’t. And she was completely unaware of where she was or what was happening. She did not even know she was raped” until months later when the DNA evidence established what had happened.
In his two hours of testimony Wednesday, Elgaafary told the jury that during the ride back to her development, the woman had begun flirting with him and talking about an ex-boyfriend she said had cheated on her. After she got out of the car to throw up at one point in the 53-minute long trip, she returned to the back seat and eventually lifted up her skirt to invite him to have sex with her, he said.
He said the woman did not appear overly intoxicated to him, even though she threw up twice — once in the back seat of his SUV — and could not remember what her address was. After they finished having sex in the car, she asked him to spend the night with her and he helped her open the door to her house. But when she told him her parents were home, he backed off and left.
Elgaafary said the sex lasted less than four minutes, and took place about 30 minutes after he picked the woman up outside the casino at 2:21 a.m.
In her closing statement, McCafferty told the jury about advice she had been given by her father when she turned 21 and could legally drink.
“May the wisdom of age act as a balance for the privilege you now enjoy,” she quoted him as writing. “He meant alcohol.” Even though the woman in the case is a “lovely, lovely young lady … wisdom did not act as a balance” for her the night of the encounter. “She drank to excess” and could not remember consenting to have sex with Elgaafary, she said.
“No woman, any woman, wants to think they had a sexual encounter that they do not remember,” McCafferty told the jurors. “But that doesn’t mean a rape occurred. It doesn’t mean a crime occurred.”
She argued that the prosecution’s case, which she had compared to “the hole in a doughnut,” had ended with vital questions in the case left unanswered and a lack of evidence that anything criminal had taken place between her client and the woman. How had the assault occurred? Where had it occurred? When had it occurred? “No one offered anything substantial to fill up that hole.”
McCafferty argued that Elgaafary’s false version of events told to the state trooper investigating the case amounted to a combination of uncertainty about what he was being asked about and a desire to hide the truth about his tryst with the woman from his wife.
“His wife is pregnant and he cheated on her,” she acknowledged. “That doesn’t make him a rapist. He succumbed to a woman who seduced him.”
“He knew she was too intoxicated to make any reasonable judgment about anything” that night. “He knew she was vulnerable, and he knew she was alone and in his car, and he could do what he wanted.”
— Assistant District Attorney Vince Cocco