DEDHAM, Mass. (CN) — Trial kicked off Monday for a professor accused of a hit-and-run that left her police officer boyfriend to die in a snowstorm steps away from another officer's front door.
Karen Read, 44, claims she was framed and corruption was rampant in the murder investigation. She pleaded not guilty to murder in the second degree, vehicular manslaughter while driving under the influence and leaving the scene of a collision.
Norfolk County Assistant District Attorney Adam Lally stood behind a wooden podium in a small courtroom in Dedham, Massachusetts, on an unusually warm spring Monday morning. He told 17 jurors — 12 of which will decide the verdict — that after a night of bar-hopping with friends on Jan. 29, 2022, Read backed her SUV into John O’Keefe, 46, and left him to die outside an afterparty at a fellow Boston police officer’s home during a snowstorm.
Lally said no one at the afterparty saw O’Keefe arrive and Read “stated repeatedly” to first responders — who were called after Read found his body where she dropped him off — that she had hit O’Keefe with her car while making a three-point turn before driving away.
Still, key pieces of evidence are in dispute.
Lally said when Read hit O’Keefe, a taillight broke and pieces of it were found by O’Keefe’s body in front of the Canton, Massachusetts home.
But defense attorney David Yannetti said in his opening statement that Read broke the taillight “many hours after the prosecution needs the taillight to be broken,” when she left O’Keefe’s house to look for him after he never came home.
Yannetti added that the lead investigator, Trooper Michael Proctor, falsified in a report the time Read’s car was taken into possession, and the pieces of taillight appeared at the crime scene after first responders arrived.
He then asked the jurors to question the Commonwealth’s “shoddy and biased investigation,” evidenced by the responding police having never entered the home at the crime scene.
Proctor knew the homeowner and the homeowner’s brother are cops, Yannetti said, so “he focused immediately and exclusively on Karen Read” because she was a “convenient outsider.”
Proctor also texted his high school friends to tell them he had Read’s phone and was searching it for nude photos, Yannetti said.
Other discrepancies, according to Yannetti, include the six partygoers who left the house but never saw O’Keefe’s body, a snowplow driver who cleared the street looking for hazards who also did not see a body in front of the house, a Google search at 2:27 a.m. by the homeowner’s sister-in-law to find out how long it takes to die in the cold, and the brother of the homeowner being a Canton police officer when the Canton police were the first law enforcement at the scene.
Moreover, O’Keefe’s injuries were more consistent with having been beaten up, not hit by a car, Yannetti said.
The first witness, O’Keefe’s younger brother Paul, described O’Keefe’s body — in between audible swallows and long pauses — as looking “pretty banged up” and having markings on his right arm. He also described Read as “a good influence on my niece and nephews.”
O'Keefe's niece and nephew, whom he adopted after his sister and her husband died in 2014, may be called as witnesses. Other witnesses include police officers, firefighters, medical personnel, Canton residents and Norfolk District Attorney Michael Morrissey.
Read's parents attended Monday's proceedings, both wearing a soft pink, the color they chose to symbolize support of Read. Dozens of Read's supporters dressed in loud pinks stood a block away from the courthouse on a lawn with signs that read "Free Karen Read" and "Stop Canton Cover Up."
Judge Beverly Cannone is presiding over the trial at Norfolk County Superior Court, which is expected to last 6 to 8 weeks. An audit of the Canton Police Department also began Monday, the result of a November 2023 special town meeting held by Canton residents worried about claims of corruption.
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