What we know: Trial begins years after Worcester girl was raped, thrown from bridge — and survived

Nearly a decade ago, a 7-year-old girl showed up on a stranger’s porch in Shrewsbury at 4 in the morning, soaked in her pajamas and covered in bruises. She said she’d just been thrown off a bridge by her “friend Josh.”

Now, the man she named — Joshua Hubert, of Worcester — is finally on trial, accused of the kidnapping, rape and attempted murder of the child.

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.

The first day of jury selection was Thursday. Before noon, four men and two women comprised half of the jury, chosen before Judge Karin Bell.

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.

He appeared with his attorney, Kevin Larson, on Thursday morning in Worcester Superior Court.

The two stood beside prosecutors Mark McShera and Emily Myers as the possible jurors submitted their answers to a questionnaire, spoke to the lawyers and were told whether they were to be excused or seated.

Prosecutors have also filed a motion to take the jury to view the I-290 bridge, where Hubert is accused of throwing the girl.

Larson, prosecutors and the judge discussed on Thursday how the court might take all of the jurors onto a boat at the scene, so they might have a close-up view underneath the bridge.

But even before opening statements have been read, new details have already emerged — including contradictory DNA evidence. Sperm cells were found on the girl’s underwear from the night of the incident in 2017, the Telegram & Gazette reported, but the DNA did not match Hubert.

Instead, it matched the girl’s father, whom she says never sexually abused her. Though they haven’t spoken in years, she reportedly said he is a bad parent — but has never been inappropriate towards her.

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 seems to be several of the girl’s family members.

It also includes more than 20 members of the Worcester Police Department and two from Shrewsbury Police, along with three state troopers and several emergency medical workers.

Hubert’s trial is expected to fully get underway this week and could continue until the week following, lawyers said.

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, 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 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, 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.