A man from Massachusetts, who was supposed to be a family friend, kidnapped a 7-year-old girl, strangled her, and threw her off a bridge into a lake. Remarkably, she survived. Years later, he has now been convicted.
On Thursday, jurors found Joshua Hubert guilty of two counts of attempted murder — one by strangulation and one by drowning — along with strangulation/suffocation and kidnapping a child under 16, according to WCVB, Boston.com and the Boston Globe.
The girl, now 15, testified that she had fallen asleep at a family cookout when Hubert lifted her from a chair and carried her to his car, according to Boston.com, the Boston Globe and MassLive.
Prosecutors said Hubert then got into the backseat and s*xually assaulted her, but the jury later rejected these charges, per the outlets. They said he put a bag over her head, tied it with rope, and forced her into the trunk of his car. He drove nearly an hour to the I-290 bridge and threw her — still in pajamas and wrapped in a blanket — into Lake Quinsigamond.
The lake can reach depths of about 90 feet, according to the City of Worcester.
“I was thinking that he wanted me dead. If I breathed really lightly and quietly, he would think that I was dead and everything would stop,” the girl told jurors, according to MassLive. “So that’s what I did.”
She also said that when she hit the water, she felt “slightly relieved … because he couldn’t hurt me anymore,” MassLive reported.
Even with her heavy, wet clothing, the girl swam about 100 yards to shore and knocked on the door of a nearby home for help, according to WCVB, Boston.com and the Boston Globe.
The jury cleared Hubert of both r*pe charges, which included aggravated r*pe of a child and r*pe of a child aggravated by age, the outlets reported.
PEOPLE previously reported that the child did not disclose r*pe allegations until 2022. She said she had not understood what r*pe was when she was 7.
During the trial, lawyers discussed how sperm cells were found on the girl’s underwear from the night of the attack, but they did not match Hubert. Instead, Hubert’s lawyer argued, the DNA matched her father, according to MassLive, Boston.com and The Gardner News.
After the verdict, Hubert’s attorney told Boston.com: “I feel like I’m living in To Kill a Mockingbird. I don’t know how rational jurors could look at the evidence and say that Joshua Hubert was guilty in this case.”
A sentencing date has not yet been set, per WCVB and the Boston Globe.
