Joshua Hubert sits in the courtroom for his dangerousness hearing on charges related to the kidnapping of a seven year old girl, Thursday, Aug. 31, 2017, in Worcester, Mass. At right is his attorney Richard Welsh Jr. (Chris Christo/The Boston Herald via AP, Pool).
A Massachusetts man will spend decades behind bars for kidnapping and strangling a then-7-year-old girl before throwing her from a bridge into the water below, forcing the young girl to swim for her life.
Joshua Hubert, 43, was sentenced Friday to 28 to 30 years in prison after a jury convicted him of attempted murder by drowning, attempted murder by strangling, strangulation or suffocation, and kidnapping a child under 16 years of age, the Worcester County District Attorney said. He was acquitted of two counts of aggravated rape of a child.
On Aug. 26, 2017, Hubert attended a cookout with the girl”s family. Early the next morning, Hubert kidnapped the girl as she was sleeping before choking her and tossing her from the Interstate 290 bridge into Lake Quinsigamond. The girl survived the fall and swam roughly 100 yards to shore and ran to a nearby home for help.
Now 15, the girl wrote a harrowing victim impact statement that was read by prosecutors during the sentencing.
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“I saw his face when he placed me in the car. I saw his face when he strangled me,” the girl wrote, according to a courtroom report from the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. “I heard his voice when he told me we were lost and that my parents had supposedly asked him to take me home.”
She continued: “The first time I realized I was in danger, all I was thinking was that I wanted to see my mom again. As we drove around for what seemed like hours, I wondered about the life I thought I’d never get to live. How I’d never get to be the big kid, the high school student, a mom, all because my life ended only seven years after it began.”
The teen said the ordeal gave her the “same recurring nightmare” which involved Hubert breaking into her home and murdering her and her family. She said whenever she replayed the events of that awful night she saw it in the third-person “almost like a sick and twisted movie.”
It has left her fearful for others.
“I’m afraid for little girls who trust unknowingly. I’m afraid for my younger cousins to know the dangers of the world. I’m afraid for my future children. I’m scared that since I couldn’t protect myself, I won’t be able to protect anyone else,” she reportedly wrote.
The girl’s mother also spoke to the court about the impact the incident has had on her daughter. Before the incident, the girl was “pure sunshine” and was always singing and dancing. But afterward, she had to learn how to be a kid again and has undergone years of therapy.
“She has gone through more in her 15 years than most people go through in their entire lives and that’s not fair,” her mother reportedly said.
As Law&Crime previously reported, the kidnapping occurred at the child’s grandparents’ home on Forestdale Road in Worcester at around 2:30 a.m. on the day in question. Hubert had been attending a barbecue at the family’s home, and was said to be familiar with the family due to his friendship with the girl’s father, according to a report by The Boston Globe.
Hubert is believed to have abducted the girl from a chair while she slept during the waning hours of the get-together. The girl, who testified during the trial, said she initially believed it was her grandfather picking her up but awoke to find the defendant putting her in his car, MassLive reported.
The defendant then drove around with the victim for some 90 minutes before the attack and subsequent disposal attempt.
“Oops, I guess we’re lost,” Hubert said at one point, the girl testified.
The girl went on to say she kicked her assailant during the attack, and she relayed some of her feelings and survival efforts.
“I was thinking that he wanted me dead,” she said. “If I breathed really lightly and quietly, he would think that I was dead and everything would stop.”
Prosecutors alleged the defendant choked and raped the girl in the backseat of his vehicle and then “placed a bag over [the girl’s] head and secured the bag with a rope in an attempt to murder her,” according to court documents obtained by the Globe.
“The victim stated that she fell for a long time and landed in the waters below,” a Worcester Police Department detective wrote in a search warrant affidavit obtained by MassLive.
During the trial, which began in early September and spanned exactly two weeks, the girl also testified she was “slightly relieved” to find herself in the water because it meant “he couldn’t hurt me anymore.”
The swim was some 100 yards across a lake with depths of up to 90 feet. She finally arrived at a house where a woman wrapped her in a towel and gave her Batman pajamas to wear. Then she was taken to a hospital where she watched the Disney show “Doc McStuffins” and answered what questions she could at the time.
After her survival, the girl told police her “friend Josh” was the man who threw her off the bridge, according to MassLive.
Hubert made bail in 2018. He was later indicted on the rape charges in 2022, when the girl said she realized what rape entailed, but he remained released on a personal recognizance bond.
During the trial, it was shown that the DNA on the girl’s underwear from the night of the incident did not match the defendant.
But another potential defense advantage did not sway jurors.
Last month, Hubert’s attorney secured a one-day pause after belatedly receiving cellphone location data from an expert hired by the state, which he described as “exculpatory in that [the findings] are inconsistent with the defendant being on or near the I-290 bridge at the time the complaining witness was allegedly thrown in the water.”
The defendant’s attorney has said he will appeal the conviction.
“There’s a lot of things in this case that are appealable, probably the biggest one being the late disclosure,” defense attorney Kevin Larson said, MassLive reported after the verdict.
Colin Kalmbacher contributed to this report
