ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Court TV) — The mother of a woman prosecutors say was killed at the hands of her husband after a night out celebrating testified that the defendant acted strangely in the days after her daughter’s disappearance.
Zarrius Hildabrand appears in court during his trial. (Court TV)
Zarrius Hildabrand, 24, is charged with first-degree murder, second-degree murder and tampering with physical evidence in the death of his new bride, Saria Barney. Hildabrand has pleaded not guilty.
On Aug. 5, 2023, Hildabrand, Saria Barney and some friends went out to celebrate the defendant’s 21st birthday. After going to Dave & Buster’s, the group tried to go to a club but were denied entry after a bouncer felt Hildabrand was already intoxicated. That’s when the group split up and Hildabrand and Saria Barney got in an Uber to return home; that was also the last time Saria Barney was seen alive.
Prosecutors say that after arriving home, Saria Barney found evidence that Hildabrand was sending photos to girls on social media and offering to fly them out. While Hildabrand’s defense says their client went to sleep only to wake up and find his wife dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, investigators say it was Hildabrand who pulled the trigger.
Meredith Barney, Saria’s mother, testified that it wouldn’t have made sense for her daughter to take her own life. “She was really excited,” she said. “She was excited for Zarrius’ 21st birthday. She was super excited because we were coming up two weeks later for my 40th birthday, so we had all these plans.”
Hildabrand met his wife while the two were in boot camp: he was a soldier in the U.S. Army, while Saria Barney had enlisted in the National Guard to be a combat medic. The two knew each other for less than a year before getting married; Saria Barney died less than eight months after their wedding.
Hildabrand told Saria Barney’s friends and family that she had walked to work the morning of Aug. 6, but that she forgot her phone. Her co-workers said she never arrived at work, and her best friend, Marie Wenz, was baffled as to why she would have been going anyway. “I thought it was weird, because she told me she was gonna call out,” she said. Hildabrand didn’t report his wife missing until Aug. 7, when he called her mother in Utah to tell her.
Meredith Barney immediately got on a plane to Alaska and coordinated with her sister and mother to create a missing persons poster. She said that Hildabrand wasn’t happy with their efforts and asked them to change her last name on the sign to “Hildabrand” and to swap his own number instead of her mother’s. Meredith Barney said her son-in-law’s behavior immediately caught her attention. He was “very paranoid and very rigid,” she testified. “He kept making excuses on why he couldn’t meet with us to do things like hang up posters or go to the police station, or when we went searching, he really didn’t want me and my sister out of his sight.”
Saria Barney’s body was found behind the couple’s apartment complex, hidden under a pillow and in a drainpipe. In her opening statements to the jury, Hildabrand’s attorney, Lacey Jane Brewster, conceded that her client made poor choices but maintained that the victim took her own life and he responded out of fear.
The trial is scheduled to resume on Monday, June 15.
