A South Florida rideshare driver is being held without bond after detectives say he kidnapped a woman who had been drinking in Miami Beach and sexually assaulted her, a case investigators pieced together from surveillance video and the victim’s own fragmented memory.
Yusel Perez-Leyva, 42, was arrested on June 18 in Doral and booked into the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center, where he remained on Monday without bond. He faces two first-degree felony charges: kidnapping, which is punishable by life in prison, and sexual battery on a physically incapacitated or helpless victim.
According to an arrest report, the woman went out on June 3 and walked out of a Miami Beach nightclub in the early hours of June 4. She told Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office detectives that she believed she had been drugged, blacked out, and remembered nothing more until she woke in pain at an emergency room in Hialeah. She came to suspect she had been raped. Detectives later reviewed surveillance footage that, they said, showed Perez-Leyva carrying the woman into his apartment near Miami Lakes.
At a bond hearing on June 20, a judge ordered him to stay away from the victim, denied bail, and ordered his pretrial detention. Court records show Perez-Leyva, who was born in Cuba, also has an immigration hold placed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. His arraignment is set for July 9.
Uber distanced itself from the case, saying the man was not using the app at the time of the incident, that he had been banned from the platform, and that the company stood ready to assist law enforcement. The arrest nonetheless lands amid mounting national scrutiny of rideshare safety, with the company facing thousands of passenger assault claims in federal litigation.
For now, a woman who set out for an ordinary night in South Florida is left to recover from an ordeal she can barely remember, while the man accused of exploiting her vulnerability sits in a county jail cell awaiting his day in court.
