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Claudia Hoerig trial set to pick up Tuesday

Defendant filed several new documents in federal court

WARREN — Week two of the Claudia Hoerig trial is scheduled to begin 1 p.m. Tuesday, when public defenders are set to launch into the defense of the woman accused of killing her husband nearly 12 years ago.

The state rested its case 2 p.m. Friday after calling local investigators and federal agents; a forensic pathologist; friends of the husband Hoerig is accused of killing; shopworkers who helped Hoerig buy and practice using guns the weekend before the shooting; and testimony indicating Karl Hoerig planned to leave the wife he met online less than two years before he was killed.

Trumbull County Common Pleas Court is closed Monday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Judge Andrew D. Logan has other criminal cases to hear Tuesday morning.

Based on statements defense attorneys made, it appears the defense will call Claudia Hoerig to testify.

Defense attorneys are tasked with putting doubts into the minds of 10 men and two women jurors about prosecutors’ claims Claudia Hoerig premeditated the shooting that killed the U.S. Air Force Reserve major and airline pilot.

Claudia Hoerig didn’t plan to kill her husband, but herself, when she bought a gun in the days before the shooting, her attorneys argued.

“She shot him because of a moment of weakness 30 days after she tried to commit suicide,” said John Cornely, one of her attorneys.

Meanwhile, Claudia Hoerig sent several new filings to U.S. District Court in Youngstown.

In one, she provides documents that outline her transition from a Brazilian citizen to an American one, but calls some text in the documents “lies” and accuses the prosecutors, investigators and other officials involved in her case of being involved in a fraudulent scheme to rob her of her rights.

According to the documents, Hoerig first entered the United States in October 1989 on a visitor visa. In May 1990, a month before her visa expired, she married Thomas Bolte, a doctor in New York.

A document with letterhead from an Amityville, N.Y. doctor, dated in 1998 — one of several other documents she filed — points out she was being treated for recurrent depression, the same year she applied to be an American citizen. She became a citizen in 1999, but claims it was when she was under duress and going through a divorce, and that she didn’t turn down her Brazilian citizenship to become an American.

Her citizenship was the focus of the yearslong effort to extradite her from Brazil. Bolte was considered as a state witness, but when the defense objected, the prosecutors said they decided not to call him anyway.

Hoerig also writes about her perception of Trumbull County from what she sees of it in the Trumbull County Jail, where she says she has never seen “so much poverty in her life” and so many with health care issues and histories with prostitution.

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