Karen Read, the Massachusetts woman whose widely watched murder trial ended with a hung jury last year, was acquitted of second-degree murder Wednesday after prosecutors retried her in the 2022 death of her boyfriend, a Boston police officer.
A Norfolk County jury also acquitted Read of two lesser charges — motor vehicle manslaughter while driving under the influence and leaving the scene of a collision that caused the death of John O’Keefe.
Read, 45, was convicted of operating under the influence of liquor. She was sentenced to one year of probation immediately after the verdict was read.
Cheers could be heard from outside the courtroom, where dozens of Read’s supporters were positioned across the street from the courthouse. Read could be seen tearfully hugging her family and defense team.
The verdict came on the fourth day of deliberations, after nearly two months of testimony and after Norfolk County Superior Court Judge Beverly Cannone summoned prosecutors and defense lawyers to the courtroom for an unusual announcement: The jury said they had reached a unanimous decision, she said, then reversed themselves and said they had not.
The trial lasted more than two months and featured dozens of witnesses, including a series of experts who, at times, offered highly technical testimony. These specialists aimed to fill in an evidentiary record that contained no eyewitness accounts or video of the events that left O’Keefe mortally wounded outside the suburban home of a now-retired Boston police sergeant during blizzard-like conditions on Jan. 29, 2022.
O’Keefe, 46, died of blunt force trauma to the head, according to the medical examiner’s report. Hypothermia was listed as a contributing factor.
More on the Karen Read case
Prosecutors alleged that Read, fueled by intoxication and anger over her crumbling relationship, reversed her SUV into her boyfriend and left him for dead in the front yard of the former sergeant, Brian Albert.
Read had just dropped off O’Keefe at Albert’s home for a gathering when the prosecution said she struck him.
“She could have broken up with him,” special prosecutor Hank Brennan told jurors in his closing argument. “She doesn’t drive away. She takes that 6,000-pound Lexus and she makes a decision. The decision is, she steps on the gas after banging it into reverse.”
Among the key pieces of evidence cited by the special prosecutor was data gathered from Read’s SUV. He called a biomechanical engineer who testified that at 12:32 a.m., outside Albert’s home, her Lexus was captured driving forward 34 feet, then suddenly accelerating backward for 53 feet at 24 mph.
No direct evidence of the hit was presented at trial, but the engineer testified that dozens of cuts on O’Keefe’s right arm were “consistent” with injuries caused by the Lexus’ broken taillight. The prosecutor presented crime scene photos that showed what he called a “debris field” — bits of red plastic scattered around the site of the apparent collision.
He also pointed to Read’s own words as evidence of her guilt. Read found O’Keefe’s body shortly after 6 a.m., and first responders who’d been summoned to the scene recalled her repeatedly saying, ‘I hit him.”
Read rejected those allegations and said she watched O’Keefe enter Albert’s home. Her attorneys said that her words had been twisted into a confession and that she was the victim of law enforcement misconduct and a tunnel-vision investigation.
In the first trial, Norfolk County Superior Court Judge Beverly Cannone allowed Read’s lawyers to present a third-party culprit defense — or an alternative theory of the crime — and identify Brian Albert and a federal agent, Brian Higgins, as possible suspects in a conspiracy that sought to frame Read for O’Keefe’s death. (Both men have denied this.)
Cannone ruled Thursday that the attorneys had not met the threshold to do so in the recent proceedings and barred the defense from identifying them as such in their closing argument. But she allowed the lawyers to argue that authorities failed to properly investigate Higgins, an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives who’d been at the Jan. 29 gathering at Albert’s home.
The defense introduced a lengthy series of text messages between Higgins and Read in the weeks before O’Keefe’s death that showed the two flirting. But she stopped texting him on Jan. 23 — a move defense attorney Alan Jackson previously suggested could have prompted Higgins to hurt O’Keefe.
Both Higgins and Albert testified during the first trial. Neither appeared at the retrial.
The defense instead focused much of its attention on challenging the circumstantial evidence cited by the prosecution. An accident reconstruction expert testified that neither the damage to Read’s SUV nor the injuries to O’Keefe’s arm were consistent with a collision. A pathologist testified that his arm injuries appeared to be dog bites.
“There was no collision,” Jackson said repeatedly during his closing argument.
Some of the defense’s most powerful testimony came from a snow plow driver who passed Albert’s home several times in the hours after the alleged collision. Asked if he saw a 216-pound, six-foot-one man lying in the yard, he responded flatly, “no.”
One of the most notable details about the proceedings was the absence of former Massachusetts State Police Trooper Michael Proctor. Proctor led the investigation into O’Keefe’s death and was fired over revelations that emerged in the first trial that he shared investigative details with non-law enforcement personnel and made derogatory comments about Read.
Defense lawyers argued that he led a biased and “corrupt” investigation — an allegation Proctor denied in the first trial — and although he was listed as a possible witness for both the prosecution and defense, neither called him to testify in the retrial.
“That should stop you in your tracks,” Jackson said in his closing argument. “Wouldn’t you want to hear from the lead investigator?”
“Michael Proctor was clearly radioactive,” he added. “The Commonwealth stayed away from him.”
In his closing argument, the special prosecutor said he didn’t need Proctor’s testimony to prove Read’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
“I’m not saying you shouldn’t be disgusted by the text messages,” Brennan, the special prosecutor, said. “You should. But that doesn’t change the physical evidence, the scientific evidence and the data.”
“He was terminated,” Brennan added. “He was held responsible for what he did. He should have been. But that doesn’t mean you get a free pass. That doesn’t change the facts.”
