MIAMI – Newly-obtained arrest documents show that two men previously accused separately in Miami rideshare rape cases are now accused of working together to victimize women who thought they were being taken home by Uber after nights out.
The new revelations come as authorities added additional sexual battery and kidnapping charges for Danny Maurad-Avecillas, 49, of southwest Miami-Dade, who Miami police first arrested back in February. Police accused him of picking up a tourist from California who believed she was drugged and sexually assaulted after waking up injured in a Little Havana hotel in January.
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Police said two more women would later come forward.
The two new cases against Maurad-Avecillas, according to police reports filed on Sunday, tie him to a previously-arrested rideshare rape suspect, Yadir Gongora.
Gongora, 40, of Hialeah, was first arrested in October 2023 after police said he posed as an Uber driver, picked up two women from a Wynwood nightclub and sexually battered one of them on South Beach. He pleaded guilty to robbery by sudden snatching in the case and received two years probation and withheld adjudication in April.
But Gongora would find himself in trouble once again in August, when Miami police arrested him after they said he raped at least two more women leaving bars in 2023, again while posing as a rideshare driver.
The rapes, police said, happened on Aug. 20 and Sept. 29, 2023. On both dates, according to the arrest reports, records showed that Maurad-Avecillas and Gongora called each other multiple times on WhatsApp.
Additionally, Maurad-Avecillas is suspected of being behind the wheel while Gongora raped a 22-year-old woman in the back seat of what she thought was a rideshare vehicle. Police said they had picked the woman up after she left a Brickell bar in the early morning hours of Aug. 20.
Police tied Maurad-Avecillas to the Sept. 29 case after a man who helped the 21-year-old victim get into what she thought was her Uber asked the driver for his phone number to send to her. Police said the number came back to Maurad-Avecillas.
DNA matches tied the rapes to Gongora, police said.
Authorities said when they took Gongora into custody on Aug. 23, he told detectives he never raped any passengers and, when shown a picture of Maurad-Avecillas, claimed to “not know his name” but said he “recognized him from the news.”
Then, when confronted with the fact that he was in a group chat with Maurad-Avecillas, police said Gongora claimed the chat “was to get notifications of events” and said he had only seen Maurad-Avecillas “outside of the clubs.”
“He denied receiving clients from (Maurad-Avecillas), swapping clients, sharing clients, or transporting clients together,” police wrote in the report.
Detectives said they asked Gongora whether Maurad-Avecillas knew him by the nickname “Alejandro El Negro Cubano,” and he “confirmed” that he did.
Aside from the calls from the nights of the two incidents, police said a data extraction revealed that Maurad-Avecillas and Gongora had been communicating since October 2022.
Both men, facing multiple kidnapping and sexual battery charges, remained behind bars without bond at Miami-Dade’s Metrowest Detention Center as of Tuesday morning, jail records show.