SEATTLE - Two men in Florida are facing the long arm of the law as police continues to add more charges in a investigation that accuses them of operating a fake rideshare service in Miami, which they used to kidnap, rape and rob inebriated women leaving nightclubs in the city, according to investigators.
One of the men involved, 49-year-old Danny Estalin Maurad-Avecillas, was arrested in February after a California woman vacationing in Florida told authorities she woke up in a Little Havana motel instead of her Airbnb on Jan. 12.
Covered in bruises and experiencing pelvic pan, police reports say that the woman did not have any idea on how she had gotten there. The woman also reported fraudulent charges racked up on her credit card and was robbed of $200 in cash, Miami police said.
A clerk at the motel in which the woman was sexually abused told police that Maurad-Avecillas used her credit card to rent a room for six hours. He told authorities that he saw Maurad-Avecillas take the woman inside the room despite her looking intoxicated.
The two men involved in the fake rideshare service are currently locked inside the Miami-Dade County jail, held without bond, on kidnapping and sexual battery charges. Police reports indicate that they both worked as rideshare drivers, but instead of working for an established service like Uber or Lyft, they either relied on a set of regular customers or they solicited business outside bars and clubs and got paid via cash apps.
Since then, more women have come forward with similar accounts involving Maurad-Avecillas' fake rideshare enterprise, according to the Miami Herald. On Oct. 13, police charged him with two more kidnapping counts along with two counts of sexual battery of a physically helpless victim, records showed.
But he did not work alone. Miami police has also linked Yadir Alejandro Gongora to the crimes, as detectives found several cellphone communications between both of them that go back to 2022, according to arrest reports.
Gongora was arrested in August for two separate cases involving allegations of kidnapping and sexual assault. Prior to being arrested, he was serving two years probation after pleading guilty to robbery in a similar case in May.
Detectives say that Maurad-Avecillas and Gongora collaborated in the crimes, with one of them driving and the other sexually assaulting the women. DNA from rape kits submitted to police then connected Gongora to a victim in August, who said they were sexually assaulted last year after leaving separate clubs. Gongora told police that he did not know the woman, denied having sex with her and said the DNA match was likely an error, his arrest report states.
In the past few months, more and more women have come forward to police to denounce Maurad-Avecillas and Gongora's crimes. A woman from Virginia told police that the two men also took her to Motel 77 in Little Havana, the same motel where the victim who was attacked in January said she was taken. And more recently, two Arizona women reported unauthorized charges on their credit cards after being picked up by Maurad-Avecillas on Feb. 21.
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