On January 29, 2022, John O’Keefe was found unresponsive in the snow, "I hit him. I hit him," Karen Read proclaimed as paramedics desperately tried to save his live, prosecutors say. The state spent most of Tuesday detailing its allegations that Read murdered her cop boyfriend in a fit of rage. It's an argument they tried before, they are now trying again.
Read, however, maintains it’s a vast conspiracy and she is being framed.
The accused-murderer-turned-true-crime star was back in court for the start of her retrial on second-degree murder, motor vehicular manslaughter, and leaving the scene of a collision causing death charges.
Read’s first trial resulted in a mistrial - and now her second trial is expected to last six to eight weeks. Opening statements began Tuesday morning, with both the prosecution and the defense vowing to use “facts, science and data” to prove their cases.
The prosecution painted Read as an angry girlfriend who rammed into her boyfriend after a long night of heavy drinking. The defense claimed Read had nothing to do with his death and she was framed by others, including law enforcement, who led a “corrupt” investigation.
Special prosecutor Hank Brennan walked through the events of January 29, 2022, from the perspective of a paramedic arriving at the scene to find an “unresponsive” man in a snow bank.
“He could hear a woman screaming and the blizzard conditions swirling around him,” Brennan said. The paramedic was providing care to the man when he asked the woman who approached — Read — whether she knew him. “I hit him. I hit him. I hit him,” she told the paramedic, the prosecutor told the jury.
In total, she told three first responders that she hit O’Keefe, Brennan argued.
“O’Keefe got out of the car, he stood by the side of the road after an argument with the defendant…an argument fueled by heavy intoxication…the defendant and her SUV drove away,” the prosecutor told the jury.
After driving 30 feet, Read put her car in neutral, she then put the Lexus in reverse and hit the accelerator - about 75 percent to full blast - and went backward at least 75 feet before hitting him, Brennan said during his opening remarks. “She clipped John O’Keefe” and then “she simply drove away,” despite him looking “mortally wounded,” he told the jury.
The prosecutor painted the picture of a happy couple, who met during the Covid-19 pandemic, that started to fall apart by early 2022. “To most of the world, it was a pretty good relationship… until the beginning of 2022 when things started to unravel.” There was tension and arguments. Days before he died, O’Keefe asked her to leave, but she wouldn’t, he said.
On the night of January 28, 2022, “she was angry and arguing with John O’Keefe” before they left for the bar but “she brought the fight back in the form of her SUV,” he said. She later left rage-filled messages to O’Keefe as he was lying in the road, Brennan accused.
The prosecutor also mentioned that the taillight of Read’s Lexus has a “big piece missing” and noted that O’Keefe’s DNA was found on the back of her car.
The late police officer was a “family man” — he didn’t have any biological children of his own but he helped raise his sister’s children, the special prosecutor said.
“They led a good life,” Brennan said. “Enter Karen Read.”
Throughout his opening remarks, Brennan vowed that the case’s “facts, science and data” will drive the case.
Alan Jackson, a defense attorney for Read, argued that these very same elements suggest O’Keefe never got in a collision that night.
“There was no collision with John O’Keefe,” he told the jury. “The experts will tell you that.”
The prosecution’s case is “untethered and unconnected to the facts and to the evidence and their assertion is contrary to science,” he argued.
Jackson read a text exchange involving Michael Proctor, the lead investigator on the case, discussing Brian Albert, a fellow officer who owned the property where O’Keefe’s body was found. Proctor was a longtime family friend of the Alberts.
“Is the homeowner gonna catch any s***?” someone texted Proctor. “Nope. He’s a Boston cop too,” Proctor replied.
“That quote defines the lack of integrity” around this case, Jackson argued. The investigation was “riddled with errors from the beginning.” It was corrupted by “bias, incompetence and deceit” and a "deliberate effort to avoid and cover up the very truth that you are seeking,” he told the jury.
Despite the sirens and chaos occurring feet from his home, Albert “a sworn peace officer and first responder, himself never came outside,” Jackson said. Proctor never conducted an investigation in the house on January 29, never properly canvassed the neighborhood or secured the crime scene, the defense attorney added.
Proctor wasn’t named by the prosecution in their opening statements. “I suspect that was by design,” Jackson said. He’s an architect of the prosecution “but he’s also their Achilles heel.”
The defense provided a different context for Read’s angry voicemails. “O’Keefe went inside Albert’s house and Read remained in the car, growing frustrated,” Jackson said. “That’s when she left him angry voicemails because she thought he was only going to be inside for a few minutes.”
The “medical evidence “will establish that he was killed somewhere else — somewhere warmer— and that his body had to be moved out in the cold,” he argued. Jackson further said O’Keefe didn’t suffer a “single injury on his body consistent with having been hit by a car.”
Jackson contended that he could have been beaten up inside the home, scratched by Albert’s dog and then his body was moved outside.
The defense also mentioned the taillight and disconnected it from O’Keefe’s death. “Read struck another car with the taillight that night,” Jackson said. The defense will show a video — five hours after she dropped off O’Keefe at Albert’s home — capturing the moment her taillight was damaged. The incident reportedly occurred in O’Keefe’s driveway.
She also “never” said “I hit him," Jackson said.
Those three words — “I hit him” — were the focus of much of the first witness’ testimony. Timothy Nuttall, a paramedic and firefighter who was called to the scene in the wee hours of January 29, 2022, was the first to take the stand.
Nuttall also testified in her first trial. There, he recalled Read saying she hit him twice in a row; now he claims she said it three times.
“Does your memory get better with time?” Jackson asked, seemingly trying to cast doubt on his memory.
Kerry Roberts, a close friend of O’Keefe’s, also took the stand. Read called her at 5 a.m. on January 29. “Kerry, Kerry, Kerry. John’s dead,” Read yelled to her on the phone before abruptly hanging up.
The pair — along with O’Keefe’s friend Jennifer McCabe — drove around in blizzard conditions looking for him. Read, “frantic,” was hopping between the back seat and sitting in between Roberts and McCabe as they drove, Roberts testified. As they approached Fairview Road, Read shouted: “There he is!”
She then started running toward a mound of snow, she testified.
“Once she got to it, you could tell it was a mound of snow that was the length of a body,” Roberts told the jury.
