A woman is accusing an Uber Eats dispatcher of raping her inside her home when he came to deliver her food.
The sexual assault happened in Wilbraham at around 7:13 p.m. on Sunday, February 9 when 21-year-old Roiber Andres Rodriguez Melendez who got the job by impersonating a woman, arrived at the victim’s home to deliver her food.
The woman noted he was a man and not a woman as specified in her order, after which Melendez requested a 4-digit code to confirm the delivery.
Melendez could not speak English and it was cold outside so the woman said she let him inside her home while she got somebody on the phone to act as a translator while they spoke with an Uber Eats support staff on the phone.
The woman then claimed that Melendez suddenly ended the call and ordered her inside the bathroom where he brutally raped her while her friend called on.
She said she was able to reach her phone after he had finished raping her. She then called her friend and told her to tell the Uber Eats driver to leave the house.
When he left, she called back her friend and told her the man raped her. The friend then called 911 and told officers that a delivery driver did not want to leave her friend’s home.
Rodriguez Melendez was arrested on February 13 and charged with rape. He also had an arrest warrant for a driving offense. He denied having any sexual encounter with the customer and said he was willing to give his DNA sample and was held on a $1,000,000 bail.
However, after his appearance in court on Wednesday, the judge held back his right to bail for 120 days after a dangerousness hearing.
In his statement, Melendez said he had worked with Uber Eats for many months and that he did not enter inside the woman’s home, and had only spent about 10 minutes in her premises.
When he was told about the camera, he said he only stepped inside the door. When he was confronted with the 30-minute time interval of the video, he claimed it was spent trying to seek out the customer’s delivery code
An Uber representative said that were monitoring the case and had banned the account of the dispatcher.
