A 29-year-old man on Friday was convicted of two counts of forced oral copulation and one count of rape for sexually assaulting an intoxicated woman who was trying to get home on BART after a holiday work party in San Francisco in December 2016.
Jurors, who deliberated for less than a day and a half, also found Meini Foster, a transient from San Francisco, guilty of multiple kidnapping charges, Alameda County prosecutor Tim Wellman said. Jurors, however, found him not guilty of an attempted sodomy charge.
Meini now faces a state prison term of 75 years to life when he is sentenced by Alameda County Superior Court Judge Paul Delucchi on Sept. 28.
Foster was accused of “preying” upon the 28-year-old woman who had taken the wrong train on Dec. 16, 2016 as she was trying to get to her home in Walnut Creek where she lived with her girlfriend. Instead she ended up on a train heading south through Oakland and San Leandro.
The woman was assaulted near the Bay Fair BART station in San Leandro. Video surveillance of the BART station shows Foster with his arm around the woman, guiding her out of the station.
Police said Foster took the woman, identified as “Jane Doe,” near the railroad tracks between Hesperian Boulevard and Halcyon Drive and sexually assaulted her there. She begged him to stop, saying, “Please, let me go,” but Foster allegedly responded, “Be cool, or I’ll have to hurt you,” Wellman said.
At one point, in the mud on her hands and knees, she tried to crawl away, but the defendant caught up with her and continued his sexual assault, despite her begging for him to stop, the prosecutor said.
After the attack, she was left “alone, cold and violated in the darkness,” Wellman said.
Through the darkness, with her cellphone battery dead, and having lost her glasses, Doe found her way to the 700 block of Begonia Drive in San Leandro around 3 a.m. to ask for help. But the residents inside mistook her for a burglar, and called police. Eventually San Leandro police found her nearby and she told them about the assault.
Images of the woman taken during a sex assault exam showed her with dirt on her face, her knees muddy, and scratches and bruises over her body.
But it was DNA evidence found on her body that connected police to Foster, who was arrested Dec. 27, 2016.
This was not the first time that Foster has been accused of sexual assault. Evidence was introduced during the trial from an August 2015 assault, in which Foster was accused of attacking a homeless woman by sexual battery, also at a BART station, the Pittsburg/Bay Point station. Foster is alleged to have groped the woman, and punched her.
Months before the December 2016 attack, Foster was also accused of the sexual battery of a 16-year-old San Francisco girl on a bus on June 2016. The girl testified at Foster’s trial.