Girl's Night Out Gone Bad? Two Lives Change in an Instant
April 21, 2010— -- A random encounter between a New Jersey woman and New York City man turned the lives of two families upside down forever. In the summer of 2005, Biurny Peguero went out for a girl's night of dancing and drinking in New York City.
"I drank like five blue Hawaiians," Peguero, now 27, told "20/20," admitting she was past her limit of the rum-based cocktail.
At the end of the night, Peguero and her best friend Aurora Pujols waited in the car while other girls picked up food from a restaurant. A group of men started talking to them and one jumped in the back seat.
The man was William McCaffrey, a 32-year-old Bronx, N.Y., contractor, who'd also been out drinking with his buddies. He invited the girls to an after party.
"We want to go to the afterhours club," he said. "Hopefully, make the ratio a little better, guy-girl."
Pujols said she got out of the car expecting Peguero to follow, but instead, Peguero took the car and drove off. "I was drunk, so I took the car," Peguero said. "McCaffrey next to me, and I drove."
Peguero left the car at a nearby parking lot and got into a white van with McCaffrey and his friends. They spent an hour driving around searching in vain for an after party.
"I got scared on the way there because I thought something was going to happen," Peguero said. "I started crying and crying and crying."
The other girls frantically tried to contact Peguero on her cell phone. They finally reached her and met Peguero back at the parking lot. When they found her, she was a mess.
"Her hair was all crazy. Her mascara was all runny," Pujols said. "She looked like she had been in a struggle."
Tensions were high between the friends, who were angry they'd been ditched. Pujols and Peguero even got into a physical fight.
"I remember her grabbing my hair and me not wanting to hit her and holding her," Pujols said.
Pujols was both stunned and furious, but the mood changed in an instant when Peguero said she'd been raped.
"He pulled off my pants. He was hitting me. And he raped me," Peguero said.
The girls -- enraged moments before -- became sympathetic. "I'm like feeling like horrible. Like just in shock," Pujols said.
They drove Peguero to the hospital, where she relayed her tale of being brutally raped to the staff and they performed a rape kit.
The next day, detectives from the New York Police Department's Special Victims Squad began an investigation. With Peguero's statement, they tracked down the white van and McCaffrey.
