Worcester girl recounts playing dead to survive bridge attack as she faces suspect in court
Normally, a 15-year-old Worcester girl would be thinking about her competitive cheerleading team, homework for her 11th grade English class or playing games on her phone.
But on Monday morning, she sat in front of the man she said kidnapped, raped and attempted to kill her by throwing her off a bridge when she was 7.
Joshua Hubert , of Worcester, 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.
Joshua Hubert in Worcester Superior Court on Sept. 4, 2025.(Irene Rotondo/MassLive)
This trial combines all of Hubert's indictments into one case. He pleaded not guilty to all charges, and his lawyer has continued to maintain his client's innocence.
Hubert has been 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.
The first day of jury selection was Thursday. Before noon that day, four men and two women comprised half of the jury, chosen before Judge Karin Bell.
On Monday, opening statements began after 9 a.m.
By 10:20 a.m., the girl was answering questions before the court and positively identified Hubert. MassLive does not name victims of rape.
She began recalling what happened the day of her little cousin's birthday party — a day that should've ended in a simple sleepover at her grandparents' house with her cousins.
Instead, it became the fight of her life.
"If I breathed really lightly and quietly, he would think that I was dead and everything would stop," she told the courtroom, recalling the night of Aug. 27, 2017.
She's been "rewatching" what happened that night in her head for years.
What happened 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 from the living room recliner, still asleep in her pink princess onesie 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.
During her testimony on Monday, she told the courtroom she woke up when she was lifted from the chair but thought it was her grandpa taking her to the air mattress in the other 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, she said.
For more than an hour afterward, surveillance footage captured him driving around Worcester, and the girl recalled him pulling over on the street multiple times — 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.
At one point, Hubert said "Oops, I guess we're lost," she recalled.
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.
On Monday, she recalled trying to kick him off of her, she said.
"I was thinking that he wanted me dead," she said.
She said he tied a rope around her neck and put a plastic shopping bag over her head. She tried to pretend that she was already dead.
"If I breathed really lightly and quietly, he would think that I was dead and everything would stop," she told the courtroom.
At one point, she recalled getting put in the trunk of the car.
Just before 4 a.m., Hubert stopped his car on the I-290 overpass at the Worcester-Shrewsbury line, according to prosecutors.
He 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 remembered being scared but also "slightly relieved" when she landed in the water "because he couldn't hurt me anymore," she told the courtroom.
"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," the Worcester detective wrote after the incident.
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.
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 dry Batman pajamas, 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.
She remembers watching "Doc McStuffins," an animated Disney Junior series, on the TV in the hospital room.
But as a 7-year-old, she didn't understand what rape was, she told the courtroom. She didn't tell anyone about that part until 2022 when she told her cousin.
As the defense challenged her account Monday, the 15-year-old began crying, but she refused to stop answering.
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, Rob Gustavson Jr., who was head of school at the time, 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.
DNA
Lawyers discussed in court Monday how sperm cells were found on the girl's underwear from the night of the incident in 2017 — but the DNA did not match Hubert.
Instead, it matched the girl's father, whom she said never sexually abused her. They haven't spoken in years, she said, adding that he is a bad parent and struggles with alcohol. But, she reiterated in court Monday, he has never been inappropriate towards her.
Lawyers hinted at being able to explain the DNA from the father in opening statements Monday.
Hubert's trial is expected to continue all week, lawyers said. There are a total of 54 possible witnesses on prosecutors' list, including the 15-year-old girl, the woman whose doorstep she showed up at and what seems to be several of the girl's family members.
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