A timeline of the 2017 Worcester bridge attack: Summer cookout turns to horror
What started as an ordinary summer night in August 2017 ended in horror : a 7-year-old girl stood dripping lake water from her onesie pajamas on a stranger's doorstep, the waistband of her Disney underwear torn clean through at the hip.
The man she said did this to her — Joshua Hubert , or as she called him, her "friend Josh" — was her father's best friend.
Prosecutors say Hubert, who faces charges including child rape, kidnapping and attempted murder, took the girl from her grandparents' as she slept on Aug. 27, 2017, drove her around Worcester and raped her, then threw her off the Interstate 290 overpass into Lake Quinsigamond.
And even after a week of trial testimony, with both sides working to unravel the timeline, the question remains: what really happened that night?
The jury returned for its second day of deliberation on Wednesday morning and began deliberating at 9:15 a.m.
Here's a timeline based on the nearly two-week trial:
Aug. 26, 2017: A summer birthday cookout
The afternoon of Aug. 26, 2017, began like any other for the girl's Worcester family.
A mother, father and their three children — the 7-year-old girl and two younger boys — were headed to a birthday party at the grandparents' home on Forestdale Street.
Upon arrival, the children ran off to play with their cousins on the grandparents' swingset outside. The adults socialized and drank around a bonfire.
Not long after the 7-year-old girl and her parents arrived, her father's childhood best friend Joshua Hubert — who was "like family," the father would later testify in court — joined the party. He came after he coached youth hockey that day, with his girlfriend and her children.
Joshua Hubert in Worcester Superior Court on Sept. 4, 2025.(Irene Rotondo/MassLive)
As the night wore on, the children begged their parents to stay at the grandparents' house for a sleepover. The 7-year-old girl's mother ended up driving back to their home in Worcester to grab pajamas for her children, returning with a pink and purple princess onesie for her daughter.
The girl changed into the onesie — keeping on the same Disney underwear she'd had on that day — and settled into the recliner chair in her grandparents' living room. Her cousins slept on the couch next to her.
Her parents left the party to go home a little after midnight, with the mother driving. The grandfather, another family member and Hubert continued to chat around the fire outside into the night.
2:30 a.m.: After the party, "he wanted me dead"
The vague sense that she was being carried awoke the 7-year-old girl, lightly, around 2:30 a.m. on Aug. 27, 2017.
She thought it was her grandfather, she told jurors, lifting her to an inflatable mattress in another room.
But she realized they had been walking too long and were outside. So, she opened her eyes and saw Hubert putting her in his car, the girl testified.
Hubert then drove around Worcester for an hour with the child in the backseat, prosecutors say, pulling over several times in the drive to strangle and rape her before putting her in the trunk.
"I was thinking that he wanted me dead," the girl, now 15 years old and a junior in high school, told the jury on Sept. 8.
Prosecutors showed footage from about eight different surveillance cameras stationed at homes and businesses throughout the city, which depicted a sedan driving through the streets of Worcester from around 2:40 a.m. to 3:30 a.m. on Aug. 27, 2017.
Hubert's attorney, Kevin Larson, questioned during the trial whether one could "even tell that that's his car or not."
In the videos, the Saturn Ion was seen driving on Lincoln Street in the city at around 2:45 a.m. Four separate cameras caught the drive on the street, which is lined with homes and businesses, capturing the movement until about 2:48 a.m.
The car was next seen driving at 2:56 a.m. from a camera in the parking lot of Over the Edge barbershop, located in a plaza at 221 Webster St.
3:00 a.m.: Hubert comes home
Hubert's ex-girlfriend testified that Hubert came home to 3 Bernice St. from the family party at around 3:00 a.m. Hearing him pull in the driveway that late — and frustrated because she had to work early the next day — the girlfriend opened the window and saw Hubert searching inside his car.
She called out to ask what he was doing, and he replied, "I think I lost my phone." She went back to bed and heard him come inside the house, and decided to get up again and used the bathroom.
Hubert passed her in the hallway, and he said, "I think I left my phone at the store." Confused because of the time, and worried Hubert had been drinking, she offered Hubert a ride, but he declined and left the house.
Hubert's car was seen again in the same barbershop plaza at 3:23 a.m., and did not pull over at any point in the footage.
3:30 a.m.: Two places at once?
Around 3:30 a.m., the record of where Hubert was becomes tangled, with an eyewitness contradicting surveillance video.
The Worcester Police Department spoke with a witness who said he saw a man and Hubert's type of car on the bridge.
Officers found it would've taken the witness 20 minutes to reach the bridge when leaving from a friend's home, which would place the witness, a 28-year-old man, on the bridge at around 3:28 a.m., Worcester officer Dyan Patient testified in court.
When he passed over the bridge, the witness said he noticed a light colored Saturn Ion pulled over in the breakdown lane. He said he saw a man outside the car, and that after he passed, the car "accelerated really quickly" and drove off.
This conflicts with surveillance footage of Hubert at 3:31 a.m., when he is clearly seen pulling into a Shell gas station parking lot at 715 Southbridge St., which is 10 miles away. The surveillance footage also shows Hubert exiting the car and he can be seen clearly.
Hubert — who his lawyer said smokes cannabis — then entered the shop, conversed with the cashier for a few minutes and bought smoking materials, the footage showed.
He exited the shop a few minutes later and got back in his car, then pulled around to the other side of the gas station, the footage showed. The car moved out of frame, then reversed back in and came to a stop.
Hubert opened the trunk of his car from his driver's seat, then got out — leaving the driver's door open behind him — and briefly peered into the trunk.
The timeline was further confused by prosecutors who said in opening statements that Hubert was on the bridge at 3:45 a.m. That timeline was based on incorrect information from the witness, who later changed the timeline during the trial.
Before 4:00 a.m.: In the trunk and water
The girl testified that Hubert had raped her and strangled her in the backseat of his car at some point in the drive, then tied a rope over her neck and put a shopping bag over her head.
He then put her into the trunk, thinking she was dead, she said.
"If I breathed really lightly and quietly, he would think that I was dead and everything would stop," she told the courtroom.
A white rope with frayed ends would later be found in Hubert's car, but it contained no forensic evidence pointing to Hubert trying to choke the girl with it.
Additionally, when investigators tested several parts of Hubert's car — including the seat covers and the seats themselves, all three seatbelts in the backseat, bottles and papers found in the car and the trunk release hatch — no evidence pointed to the girl being in the car.
While prosecutors did not offer an exact time when the 7-year-old girl's body, wrapped in a plush navy blue blanket, careened 40 feet down into Lake Quinsigamond, the girl recalled how she felt when it happened.
She remembered being scared, but "slightly relieved" when she landed in the water, "because he couldn't hurt me anymore," she told the courtroom.
She recalled being able to stand at certain points in the lake — which reaches depths up to 90 feet, with an average depth between 20-30 feet — zipping up her onesie again and holding onto the navy blue blanket.
The girl then swam about 100 yards to shore, prosecutors said, after she saw the glow of the light at a home on Lear Street North. She told the courtroom how she got to the pebbly shore and climbed over a rock wall, got to a doorstep and started to knock.
4:00 a.m.: The 911 call
The 911 call came in at approximately 4 a.m. from a woman named Maeve Geary, who lived at the home on Lear Street North where the girl appeared.
She'd been asleep when she was awoken by knocking at the door, and took the girl inside. The girl was given her nephew's dry superhero pajamas to change into; her soaked onesie was found abandoned in the woman's bathroom when police arrived.
"911, this call is recorded. What is your emergency?" the recording of the call made on Aug. 27, 2017, rang out in the courtroom. Geary immediately gave her address and directed officers to enter a door through "the basement part by the lake."
"I was asleep and I had a knock at the door ... and there's this little girl here ... she's soaking wet," Geary told the operator.
"She says she was thrown in the lake by a friend of hers when she was asleep in her home ... she said something about him taking her from her parents' house and throwing her in the lake," she said.
The operator parroted back, "She said this was a friend of hers? A friend of hers took her from her parents' house and threw her in a lake?" Geary replied "yes" to both questions.
But Geary called another person before contacting the police, Larson said. That person was a man who would later voluntarily submit to DNA testing in connection with the case on Dec. 14, 2017, to the Worcester Police Department.
His name came up for the first time in the trial on the fifth day of testimony, and there was no explanation offered by prosecutors on his identity — only that he'd submitted for DNA testing.
This man's DNA sample was sent to the Massachusetts State Police Crime Laboratory to create a DNA profile.
The DNA samples from Hubert, the girl's father and the third man were tested against the sperm found on the underwear.
It was the girl's father who came back as a match.
State police forensic scientist Alanna Frederick testified that it was actually two DNA samples found on the underwear — and neither belonged to Hubert.
"Who is [the third man]? Why was [he] asked to give a voluntary DNA sample, and why was his DNA analyzed?" Larson posed to the jury during closing statements on Monday.
In their own closings, prosecutors told the jury they'd "heard a little about" the third man, but that "there's nothing you heard about him from" the girl in her testimony.
"Why? She knows who did this to her," prosecutor Mark McShera said. "[The third man] has essentially nothing to do with this case." The Worcester District Attorney's Office also declined to comment on the third man.
4:16 a.m.: Witness texts about man on bridge
At 4:16 a.m., the 20-year-old sent a text message to a friend that said, "I just drove through Worcester, swear to God I saw a dude throw a gun off a bridge into Lake Quinsigamond."
He testified that the message was a lie and he'd been trying to impress that friend, and said he'd merely seen a man outside of what he was certain was a Saturn Ion car, whom he'd described as "medium build," and Larson rebutted that his client is much heavier.
4:30 a.m.: Hubert comes home again
It was between 4:15 and 4:30 a.m. by the time Hubert returned home, his ex-girlfriend testified.
She asked if he'd found his phone and he said, "'Yeah, thank God, because I can't afford to get a new one,'" she testified.
Hubert was fast asleep when she got up for work an hour later.
8:52 a.m.: Hubert goes to the car wash
Footage from Ernie's Car Wash in Worcester showed Hubert arrive at around 8:52 a.m. with his son and spend less than 10 minutes at the wash.
The footage appeared to show Hubert pull up in his Saturn Ion, park and walk out of frame for several minutes.
Hubert's son vacuumed the backseat of the car while the pair were at the station, the footage showed, and removed something from the trunk to throw it away. They left the gas station at 9:01 a.m.
Police later collected the debris from the vacuum bag used by Hubert's son, which did not yield any evidence in connection with the crime.
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