Tribune Chronicle / R. Michael Semple Claudia Hoerig testifies Tuesday how she shot her husband, Karl Hoerig, and then watched his body tumble down the stairs of their Newton Falls home in March 2007. She testified as part of the defense’s case during her aggravated murder trial before Trumbull County Common Pleas Court Judge Andrew D. Logan. The trial is expected to resume today.

WARREN — Both Claudia and Karl Hoerig were preparing to end their rocky, short-lived, Match.com marriage, were dating other people and were looking for new living arrangements when a surprise pregnancy sent her into a suicidal spiral, she testified Tuesday in Trumbull County Common Pleas Court.

“I wasn’t joking around. I meant to kill myself,” Claudia testified in Judge Andrew D. Logan’s court after describing a device she created to ensure the gun’s recoil wouldn’t leave her gravely injured, but would ensure her death.

She didn’t plan to kill Karl, an Air Force Reserve pilot, but planned to kill herself, she said.

When she went to use the device, she set the gun in it to steady it and keep it in place, she said. Her “blood was very hot” and it was really “difficult,” but she did pull the trigger on herself after killing Karl. She said the gun didn’t fire.

Hoerig described two prior suicide attempts, including one that landed her in a hospital a month before the fatal March 2007 shooting in the couple’s West Ninth Street house in Newton Falls. She also testified that thoughts of suicide didn’t leave her psyche when she left the country for Brazil.

She contemplated jumping off several tall hotel buildings and filling a shack she had built there with car exhaust fumes, but things got in the way — like fear she would crush an innocent person as she plunged to her death, or neighbors wondering why the Volkswagen Beetle she bought was on for so long and making a loud noise, she testified.

Hoerig said she never planned to kill her husband and the two were working on plans to separate when she found out for the third time she was pregnant and decided to try to talk Karl Hoerig into either helping her raise the baby together or getting him to give her some type of blessing to raise the baby alone in New York, where she first lived when she came from Brazil on a visitor’s visa in 1989.

The only reason she bought a gun, almost bought a second gun and went to the firing range in the days before the March 12, 2007, shooting was because Karl Hoerig’s other guns were locked up and inaccessible to her after her previous suicide attempts, she said.

But then Karl Hoerig said he was going to adopt his soon-to-arrive grandchild because his daughter was 18 and wanted to go to school, instead of raising a child with Claudia, whom he married in Las Vegas in the summer 2005. The two met online and visited each other in five trips to Ohio and New York, where she was working as an accountant.

If he hadn’t said he’d like to raise his grandchild instead of their baby, “he’d be alive now and I would be dead,” she said.

She said she “lost control of” herself.

“I was most upset over him telling me he was going to adopt his daughter’s child and I had no right to have my baby,” she said. “I was very angry.”

“I was baffled, why can’t I have this child? Why can’t I have the right to be a mother? I didn’t want it, I didn’t plan it,” Hoerig said.

She had never been pregnant after 10 years of marriage to a man she met in New York and married in 1990, and never had the desire, she said. But after two miscarriages with Karl, she knew she didn’t want an abortion and started to want to be a mother, she said.

The third pregnancy also ended in a miscarriage, she said.

Hoerig wore a black jacket as she sat in the witness stand from about 1:30 p.m. to after 4:30 p.m. Tuesday with a short break. She cried periodically on the stand.

Trumbull County prosecutors are expected to cross-examine her when court resumes 9 a.m. today.

Hoerig described how quickly their relationship deteriorated. They nearly didn’t get married and after they did, she thought immediately about getting it annulled. However, she lost her job when she admitted to her employer she lied about missing work to go marry Karl, something she said he forced her to do. Without a job, and gaps in her resume, she said she no longer felt like she could support herself alone in New York, so she stayed and tried to follow his rules, to make him happy and help him get over his own “psychological” issues, she testified.

Hoerig described unusual sexual kinks and said Karl Hoerig made her follow rules — including forcing her to wear revealing clothing at home and in public, only allowing her to wear open-toed shoes in his presence, giving her a menu to cook when he was home and insisting she use her savings to pay for things.

She said when she lost her temper and turned the gun on him instead of herself, he was walking down the stairs and was killed immediately. Prosecutors argue there was no active confrontation when he was shot, that the combat veteran was tying his shoes at the bottom of the stairs and she “ambushed” him.

Claudia Hoerig described what she did in the weeks after fleeing to Brazil. Her father, sister and brother-in-law, a pastor, talked her out of immediately killing herself or calling police. They told her to fly to Brazil, so she used Karl Hoerig’s employee privileges with Southwest Airlines to fly from Pittsburgh to New York and then bought a ticket with cash to Brazil.

She said she wanted to give her father “one more kiss and one more hug.” Hoerig said her dad started directing her what to do, and told her to get her passport and other documents from the bank and find a plane out.

“I felt like the little girl that daddy is taking care of,” Hoerig said.

After seeing her father and hearing him tell her he loved her “for the first time ever” in her life, she decided not to kill herself then, but the thoughts didn’t leave her mind and she booked expensive hotels in order to jump off them, but couldn’t for one reason or another.

Claudia Hoerig said she wanted to meet “a loving father.”

“It was so beautiful. He came in a cab like I was a princess, like he was going to rescue me,” Hoerig said of when her father came to pick her up from a hotel in Brazil. “This is what I waited my entire life for, for my father to hold me and say he loved me.”

She said she stayed with her father for a short time, then siblings who “wanted to commit her.” She went to a piece of land she bought years before and married the man who built her a shack there, she said.

The defense is expected to call a few other witnesses. John Cornely, an attorney with the Ohio Public Defender’s Office, questioned his client. Local public defender David Rouzzo is also working on the case.