Crime

Charges dropped against Boston Uber driver accused of rape

The driver was released from jail on Friday after over a month in custody.

Prosecutors with the Suffolk District Attorney’s office are no longer pursuing a case against a Boston Uber driver accused of rape. Stock Photo

By Emilia Wisniewski

March 24, 2025

2 minutes to read

Prosecutors dropped charges against an Uber driver accused of rape last month after forensic tests yielded negative results, officials said.

After over a month in custody, Hermann Ngoufack Jiokeng, 39, was released from jail on Friday, his attorney William Gens said told Boston.com. A hearing was scheduled for this week, but prosecutors with the Suffolk District Attorney’s office filed a disposition to no longer pursue the case.

“Additional information obtained and reviewed by the Commonwealth, including negative results of forensic testing, establishes that the charges against the defendant cannot be proved beyond a reasonable doubt based on the current state of the evidence,” the disposition read.

Boston police arrested Jiokeng, from Brighton, on Feb. 23 after a woman accused him of sexually assaulting her during a ride on Feb. 22 from South Boston to her residence, according to a statement from the Boston Police Department.

Jiokeng was arraigned in South Boston District Court on Feb. 24 and pleaded not guilty, according to court records. He was ordered held without bail.

William Gens, a civil rights attorney with Gens & Stanton in Boston, said Jiokeng is a “stand-up guy” who worked as a lender with Eastern Bank and drove at night for Uber. Jiokeng had no previous criminal record.

Gens said the woman who accused Jiokeng had “highly inconsistent statements” when interviewed by police. She claimed on the day of the attack that two white men took her out of the Uber, into a second car, and assaulted her. At the hospital the next day, she said one of the men was the Uber driver, Gens said.

Jiokeng, a Black man originally from Cameroon, did not fit the woman’s description, Gens said. Police interviewed the woman to clear up inconsistencies and she told police that she “consumed a lot of alcohol on the prior date and has started to question some of the details she has provided,” and then said she believed it was two Black men, one of them the driver, according to The Boston Globe.

Gens said he hopes Jiokeng can begin “putting the pieces back together of his life.”

“While we try as best we can to protect victims, especially women, from violent assaults and sexual type of abuse, it always has to be measured against the life of the person who’s being accused,” Gens said.