Judge sentences Uber driver to eight years for sexual assault

A 53-year-old Uber driver was sentenced on Friday to 8 years in state prison for sexually assaulting a young female passenger while she was intoxicated in 2017.

Alameda County Superior Court Judge Mark McCannon gave Raymond Kai Young a tongue-lashing at his sentencing hearing.

He said:

“What you did was despicable and I wish I could give you more time for what you did.”

McCannon continued:

You will have to live with this forever and she will have to live with this forever. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

Before Young was sentenced, the victim said that for a long time she has had trouble dealing with what happened to her.

She said:

“I was feeling insecure about how people think about me and I had a lack of desire to get better.”

The young woman said:

“I closed myself off to everything and everyone and I had anxiety every day for two years.”

Young was charged with kidnapping to commit a sex crime, rape of an unconscious person and sexual penetration against the victim’s will by force, fear or violence for the incident the night of March 11, 2017, and the early morning hours of the next day.

But on July 16 the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office agreed to a deal in which he only pleaded no contest to the sexual penetration charge and the kidnapping and rape counts were dismissed. The deal called for him to get an eight-year prison term.

On the evening of March 11, 2017, the victim and a friend took an Uber car from Lafayette to a concert venue in San Francisco, but she had been drinking and when they arrived in San Francisco she vomited while waiting in line to get into the venue, Oakland police Officer Brian Murphy wrote in a probable cause statement.

The woman’s friend then ordered another Uber driver, later identified as Young, to pick her up and take her back to a house in Lafayette, according to Murphy.

Uber records indicate that the ride ended at 10:37 p.m. that night but the victim later said she blacked out on the way into San Francisco and doesn’t remember vomiting or getting into Young’s car, Murphy said. The woman told police that she woke up in the back seat of Young’s car and he was penetrating her vagina with his finger without her consent, Murphy wrote.

Young stopped after she woke up and began to question him about who he was and where her friends were, according to Murphy.

Young told her that he was an Uber driver and he drove her to her residence in Oakland, Murphy said.

The officer said it appears that Young ended the official ride with the victim in Lafayette without getting out of his car.

Murphy wrote:

”Without the victim’s knowledge or consent, it appears that the suspect (Young) drove the victim to an unknown location in Lafayette and then to an unknown location in Oakland where he sexually assaulted her.”

Young was arrested in Modesto, where he lived, on July 18, 2017. Young’s lawyer Lewis Romero wrote in an unsuccessful bail motion last year that Young, who used the services of a Cantonese interpreter, immigrated to the U.S. with his family in 1976 and raised four children as a single father.

Romero said Young first worked as a chicken farmer and later worked as a trucker and a cargo delivery driver.

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