After a night of drinking, Karen Read drove her boyfriend, Boston police Officer John O’Keefe, to a fellow cop’s house for a party during a winter storm shortly after midnight on Jan. 29, 2022.
Prosecutors say as O’Keefe walked toward the house in Canton, Read hit him with her SUV and left him to die out in the cold. She says she saw him go into the house and believes an altercation with someone inside rendered him unconscious and the people inside thew him into the front yard then conspired to frame her.
After leaving the home of the after-party, Read says drove home and fell asleep. She awoke and realized O’Keefe never made it home. He wasn’t answering her calls. Two friends went and picked her up and drove her back to where she dropped off O’Keefe. They found his body under some snow. An autopsy determined he died of blunt force trauma to the head and hypothermia.
More on Law&Crime: Karen Read trial: Peeling back the layers of a complicated case
“Could I have hit him?” Read allegedly said when she arrived back at the scene. “Did I hit him?”
According to the prosecution, Read knew she hit O’Keefe and left him there because their relationship was unraveling with allegations of infidelity. Prosecutors say there are plenty of text messages and witness testimony to back up the claims of an unhealthy relationship, with Read allegedly saying at one point “John, I f—— hate you!” They also point to a busted taillight on the SUV, pieces of the taillight on O’Keefe’s body and his hair under the vehicle as evidence. The autopsy could not determine the manner of death, but said his injuries were consistent with a vehicle hitting him.
John O’Keefe and Karen Read. (Images via BPD portrait and WBZ-TV screengrab, respectively.)
A Norfolk County grand jury indicted Read on second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating under the influence of alcohol and leaving the scene of personal injury and death.
But her lawyers will be pursing a third-party culprit defense. The attorneys have said either the owner of the home where the party took place, Brian Albert, his nephew Colin Albert or their buddy Brian Higgins, an ATF agent, are responsible for O’Keefe’s death. They say pictures of the body show O’Keefe had been in a fistfight and bitten by the dog inside. They also claim one of the people made a Google search “ho[w] long to die in the cold” three hours before the discovery of the body, though prosecutors say their expert says the search happened after finding O’Keefe’s body. Albert and others then used their connections with law enforcement to skirt responsibility and lay blame on Read, according to the defense.
As the case developed, the U.S. Attorney’s Office of Massachusetts started its own grand jury investigation, possibly looking into police misconduct. One key revelation that the defense will try to use to its advantage: An expert hired by the feds determined that a vehicle did not hit O’Keefe. On the other hand, prosecutors say the federal investigation largely came to the same conclusions the state did.
The trial is expected to last six or seven weeks.
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