A San Francisco jury has convicted a 36-year-old man of rape, false imprisonment, misdemeanor assault, criminal threats and misdemeanor child abuse stemming from a two-day ordeal in September 2023 that left his partner and her son terrorized, according to officials from the district attorney's office. Murad Bahruddin now faces sentencing after jurors found he threatened the woman and her children with a kitchen knife and raped her, while also threatening to kill the family and flee to another country.
Prosecutors said the attack unfolded over two days beginning on September 18, 2023, when Bahruddin came to the victim's home accusing her of cheating, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle. That night, prosecutors said he threatened to kill the victim and her children with a kitchen knife, pushed her into a bathroom, and attempted to rape her while demanding oral sex. The Chronicle report, written by Annie Vainshtein, details how the ordeal escalated into the following morning.
A Second Day of Terror
The next morning, prosecutors said, Bahruddin was still in the victim's home holding a kitchen knife and her cellphone. After she returned from dropping a child off at school, officials said he forced her onto her bed at knifepoint, cut her neck superficially, threatened again to kill her and her children, and raped her. Prosecutors said he also spoke of fleeing to another country before ultimately forcing her to pack and carry his belongings out to his vehicle.
Investigators said Bahruddin had called and emailed the victim more than 300 times, a detail prosecutors used to illustrate the pattern underlying the two days of threats. The same reporting notes that the victim's son told authorities he heard his mother being sexually assaulted on the night of September 18, 2023, and that he slept with a meat cleaver under his pillow that night. The boy, whose age was not disclosed, also told authorities that Bahruddin had physically abused him before.
Prosecutor Describes Years of Abuse
Assistant District Attorney Abigail Adams said the survivor and her children endured years of physical and emotional abuse by Bahruddin that culminated in the events of September 18 and 19, 2023. Adams said domestic violence causes lasting emotional wounds that can take years to heal, a statement that underscores prosecutors' framing of the case as part of a sustained pattern rather than an isolated incident.
The case lands amid broader data showing the severity of California domestic-violence incidents has been climbing even as overall case numbers shift. The California Policy Lab found the state recorded about 163,000 domestic-violence calls for assistance in 2024, with 61% of those calls reporting the use of a weapon; calls reporting weapon use increased 44% over the past decade. San Francisco itself averaged 406 domestic-violence calls for assistance per 100,000 people annually from 2015 through 2024, according to the Policy Lab's analysis.
Convictions Have Declined Even as Severity Rises
Despite the rise in weapon involvement, California domestic-violence convictions fell by 29% statewide from 2015 to 2023, amounting to about 6,600 fewer convictions in 2023 than in 2015, per the Policy Lab's research. San Francisco was among counties with fewer than 25 domestic-violence convictions per 100,000 people annually, the organization's data shows. Separately, the Public Policy Institute of California reported that more than half of the state's domestic-violence incidents involved aggravated domestic assaults in 2023, compared with 35% in 2019, and that the share of incidents involving objects climbed from 6% in 2013 to 12.5% in 2023.
The institute also found that urban counties saw domestic-violence calls rise 1.9% between 2021 and 2023, even as suburban counties saw declines of 18.6% and rural counties 12.0% over the same period. The Policy Lab additionally reported that about nine in ten people convicted of domestic violence in California were male, with an average age of 35 — close to Bahruddin's age of 36 at the time of his conviction.
A Separate San Francisco Case Drew a Conviction Earlier This Year
The Bahruddin verdict follows another San Francisco case that drew a conviction earlier this year. In June, a San Francisco jury convicted Roberto Lopez of assault with a deadly weapon, aggravated battery and other charges for slashing a woman's neck in an unprovoked 2023 attack in the Inner Sunset, according to the Chronicle. Prosecutors in that case said Lopez slashed the victim on the 1200 block of Funston Avenue and was arrested just minutes later about four blocks away; the woman was hospitalized and required 16 stitches, the Chronicle reported.
Bahruddin's conviction on multiple felony and misdemeanor counts now moves the case toward sentencing. The Chronicle's coverage, which included an image credited to Dan Hernandez, did not disclose a sentencing date.
