Jury selection begins in 2017 Worcester rape case of child thrown from bridge
The 7-year-old girl fell for what felt like forever before hitting dark, cold water below the Interstate 290 overpass in Worcester. Her soaked pajamas clung to her skin and the blanket wrapped around her was waterlogged, dragging the small child down as she struggled to see the distant shoreline.
She swam for her life around 4 a.m. on Aug. 27, 2017, hours after a family friend — Joshua Hubert , a 35-year-old at the time — left her parents' home following a summer party.
Nearly a decade later, jury selection is scheduled to begin Thursday in the case against Hubert, who is accused by authorities of kidnapping, raping and attempting to kill the young girl by throwing her off that highway overpass into Lake Quinsigamond.
Joshua Hubert is escorted into the courtroom for his dangerousness hearing on charges related to the kidnapping of a seven-year-old girl. At right is his attorney Richard Welsh Jr. on August 31, 2017. (Photo by Chris Christo/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald via Getty Images)Chris Christo/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald
The girl — now a teenager — survived, telling police at the time it was her "friend Josh" who threw her off the bridge. Years later, she told her therapist that Hubert sexually assaulted her during the kidnapping, The Boston Globe reported.
Hubert is charged with forcible child rape, child rape aggravated by age, two counts of attempted murder and a single count each of kidnapping a child under 16 and strangulation, across multiple indictments in connection with the 2017 incident.
This trial will combine all of Hubert's indictments into one case. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges, and his lawyer has continued to maintain his client's innocence.
Hubert is currently out on bail since he posted the $50,000 bail set in 2018, and partially due to the pandemic's impact on Massachusetts court systems. He was also ordered released on personal recognizance after his indictment on the rape charges in 2022.
There are a total of 54 possible witnesses on prosecutors' list, which includes the girl herself, the woman whose doorstep she showed up at and what seem to be several of the girl's family members.
Prosecutors have also filed a motion to take the jury to view the I-290 bridge, where Hubert is accused of throwing the girl.
What happened that night in 2017?
The 7-year-old girl had known Joshua Hubert — or "Josh," as she called him — her entire life. He'd been best friends with her parents for nearly 15 years by the time she was born, and it wasn't unusual for him to be at their Forestdale Road home in Worcester for a summer family gathering.
What was unusual, prosecutors say, was what happened hours after the party ended on Aug. 27, 2017 — when Hubert took his best friends' daughter, still asleep in her pajamas and wrapped in a blanket, and drove off with her in the middle of the night.
Around 2:30 a.m., Hubert placed the 7-year-old girl into his Saturn Ion and left the house, prosecutors said.
For more than an hour afterward, surveillance footage captured him driving around Worcester and making several stops — including at a gas station, checking the trunk of his car on Southbridge Street and at his girlfriend's home on Bernice Street. There, prosecutors say, he told her to delete all of his encrypted data stored with LastPass.com, a digital password management system.
Hubert pulled over and got in the backseat with the child at some point in the drive, prosecutors said, and raped her. She was strangled during the incident with both hands, which left bruises across her neck and body.
"When asked if she had tried pushing him away, she stated, 'I tried that but it didn't work,'" Worcester Detective Dylan Patient wrote in search warrant affidavits obtained by MassLive in 2018.
Just before 4 a.m., Hubert stopped his car on the I-290 overpass at the Worcester-Shrewsbury line, according to prosecutors.
He then threw the child, wrapped in a blanket, over the bridge into Lake Quinsigamond.
"The victim stated that she fell for a long time and landed in the waters below," Patient wrote. The lake reaches depths up to 90 feet, with an average of between 21 and 36 feet.
"She stated that she began to swim to a building she could see, but the blanket she was carrying was getting very heavy, which made it difficult to swim. She then swam to a house and stated that she was able to stand up in the water," Patient added.
The girl swam nearly 100 yards to a home on North Lear Street, where a woman named Maeve Geary took her in. After wrapping the child in a towel and giving her warm clothes, Geary called the police.
The child was taken to the hospital after police arrived, where she gave a detailed account of the night, positively identified Hubert through pictures and officers observed strangulation marks on her neck.
At around the same time, a witness texted a friend joking that they'd seen someone throw something off the I-290 overpass at around 4:15 a.m., when they'd been driving on the highway earlier and saw a Saturn parked in the breakdown lane. The witness also saw a man walking around the car, prosecutors said.
After his arrest, Hubert was suspended from his job at the Fay School in Southborough, a private co-ed school, where he'd worked in the school's technology department as a systems support analyst since July 2017. School officials said he did not have any contact with children.
In a letter sent out to parents on Aug. 29, 2017, Head of School Rob Gustavson Jr. said Hubert was hired in early July in the school's technology department as a systems support analyst, and called the incident a "troubling event."
Before that, Hubert worked as an emergency medical dispatcher in 2007 for the Sterling Police Department from May to August. He left the position during his one-year probationary period, the department said.
Jury selection begins at 9 a.m. in Worcester Superior Court on Sept. 4.
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