‘Track my phone’: Jurors see police interview with man accused in Worcester bridge attack
Hours after a 7-year-old girl appeared at a stranger's door — soaking wet in her pajamas — along the shore of a Worcester lake in 2017, the man she said threw her off a bridge into the water sat down with a detective and denied any involvement.
Worcester Police Det. Tyler Collette asked Joshua Hubert, 35 at the time, if he made any other stops "other than the Shell gas station" that night?
Hubert sat in a chair, his back against the wall of the interview room and his right leg crossed over his left.
"Track my phone, look at their cameras," Hubert said.
"I didn't go anywhere. I didn't hurt this girl," he told the detective.
The footage of the interview was seen on Friday by the jury in the trial against Hubert, amongst several other surveillance videos from the early morning hours of Aug. 27, 2017.
Now 43, Hubert faces several indictments in connection with the attempted murder and rape of a 7-year-old girl in Worcester in 2017, which are being combined into one case for the trial that began with opening statements on Monday. He is charged with two counts of attempted murder and two counts of the rape of a child, along with strangulation and kidnapping charges.
Prosecutors say Hubert — a childhood friend of the victim's father — kidnapped the girl from her grandparents' home after a party, then raped and strangled her in his car before throwing her from the Interstate 290 overpass into Lake Quinsigamond.
The girl survived and told police it was her "dad's friend Josh" who had thrown her from the bridge.
During testimony on Thursday and Friday, prosecutors called a span of witnesses, who ranged from medical professionals who treated the girl after the attack, a 28-year-old man who said he saw the same kind of car Hubert drives and a man parked on the I-290 bridge and multiple Shrewsbury and Worcester police officers who investigated the case.
The jury also viewed the first pieces of evidence to be physically presented, carefully removed from brown paper evidence bags sealed with red tape.
This included the girl's underwear she was wearing that night — which was fully ripped on the front left side, and is said to have contained her father's sperm cell DNA, not Hubert's. Prosecutors showed the blanket she was wrapped in and her pajamas. They also showed rope that was found inside Hubert's car.
And as of 11:30 a.m. on Friday, the jury was shown multiple surveillance videos that depict Hubert's actions and location on Aug. 27, 2017.
Besides Hubert's police interview, jurors saw video surveillance from a home at 350 Lincoln St. in Worcester, that police said showed Hubert's car driving by the residence at around 2:48 a.m.
There was also footage from a Shell gas station he visited at around 3:30 a.m., where he appears to buy smoking materials, then pull to the other side of the gas station and look at his car trunk.
The trial has spanned for more than a week and spun into an array of conflicting accounts, especially as prosecutors admit there is no forensic evidence against Hubert — but there is evidence of her father's DNA on her underwear.
The girl's own testimony on Monday came before her mother's and father's, who each tried to explain why the girl's father's sperm cell DNA might have been on her underwear.
Then, on Wednesday, the jury was adjourned for the day after new evidence came to light, that Hubert's lawyer said was withheld from him by prosecutors. This evidence — cellphone tower mapping of Hubert's phone — shows Hubert was not on the bridge the night of the attack, his lawyer told MassLive. However, this evidence has not been brought up during the trial as of Friday morning.
The trial continued for further testimony Friday afternoon.
More joshua Hubert
Read the original article on MassLive . Add MassLive as a Preferred Source by clicking here .
