Updated Nov. 8, 2017 at 5:08 p.m.
A former Uber driver who raped a female passenger in North Park and sexually assaulted as many as 14 others, including teenagers who were unconscious from drugs or alcohol, was sentenced Wednesday to 80 years and four months in prison.
John David Sanchez, 53, pleaded guilty in August to 34 charges, including rape and sodomy of an unconscious person.
Sanchez was initially arrested about a month after he raped the Uber passenger on Feb. 26, 2016. He posted bail and was fired by the ride-hailing service.
Investigators from the El Cajon Police Department searched the defendant’s computer and subsequently located other women and girls — ranging in age from 13 to 21 years old — who had been assaulted by Sanchez as far back as 2011, but had not reported the attacks.
Sanchez plied the girls and women with marijuana, Xanax and alcohol, and when they passed out, he “had his way with them” and videotaped the sexual assaults, said Deputy District Attorney Kerry Conway.
“They didn’t know — many of them — about the offenses until this investigation, so they had to be told that they were assaulted, after the fact,” the prosecutor told reporters. “It’s taken a toll on them.”
Aside from the 26-year-old rape victim in the Uber incident, most of the victims were known to Sanchez, who would invite thems to his home, buy drugs and alcohol for them and let them hang out with their friends from high school, Conway said. Sanchez befriended one of the girls at the Parkway Plaza mall and met some of her friends through her, the prosecutor said.
In court, Conway urged Judge Evan Kirvin to sentence Sanchez to the maximum term — 96 years and four months behind bars.
“I think this defendant has earned every single minute of those 96 years,” she said. “What he did was vile.”
An emotional Conway told the judge it was impossible to put into words what Sanchez had done to the victims.
“It was pure evil,” the prosecutor said.
She said a message needed to go out to the community that what Sanchez did was “unforgivable.”
–City News Service