Amber Michelle Hilberling, now 21, was seven months pregnant when she pushed Joshua Hilberling, then 23, through a glass window in their Tulsa apartment during a fight on June 7, 2011. Joshua Hilberling fell 17 stories to his death, landing on a parking garage.
Now with a young son, Hilberling couldn’t convince the jury of seven men and seven women that she pushed her husband in self-defense. Her defense team further argued she didn’t intend to push him out the window and that the glass in the apartment window, installed in 1966, was too thin for use in high-rise windows. She even sued University Club Tower in Tulsa for alleged negligence stemming from the "dangerously unsafe" glass, reported local newspaper Tulsa World.
So convinced of her innocence, Amber Hilberling turned down a plea deal that would have seen her serve only five years in prison.
But it took the jury only three hours of deliberation to find her guilty after a week long trial.
“It didn’t happen like she said it happened,” the World reported Assistant District Attorney Michelle Keely said during the trial.
Joshua was reportedly a hulking, 6-foot-5-inch, 220-pound former football player and the couple had been married only a year. The short, tumultuous marriage was littered with incidents of Amber Hilberling’s violence against her husband, witnesses testified.
Joshua Hilberling had planned to leave and even had packed his bags, sparking the fatal fight. A month before his death, Joshua Hilberling filed for a protective order against his wife, claiming she had thrown a lamp at him, resulting in a cut that needed stitches and staples.
Even more damning was a video recorded at the Tulsa Police Department immediately after Joshua Hilberling’s death where his wife admits Joshua’s parents knew the dangerous path down which the union was headed.
“They kept saying if we stayed together, I’m going to kill him,” a bawling Hilberling was secretly recorded telling her grandmother.
The defense plans to appeal the conviction. Oklahoma’s second-degree murder law requires the prosecution to prove the act was “imminently dangerous” and “evincing a depraved mind.” Intent to kill is not required to convict.
The widowed murderer will be sentenced April 23 and faces a jury-recommended 25 years in prison.
"Justice doesn't bring Josh back," Keely, the prosecutor said, adding “Levi (their 19-month-old son) will grow up knowing there are consequences to actions.”
