Lawyers for Karen Read rested their case Wednesday, nearly two weeks after they began mounting a defense that sought to undermine allegations that she drunkenly backed her SUV into her boyfriend, a Boston police officer, and left him for dead three years ago.
The case, which prompted intense media coverage and allegations of law enforcement misconduct that led to the firing of the case’s lead investigator, could be with the jury in Dedham, Massachusetts, by the end of the week.
Read’s sensational first trial ended nearly one year ago with a jury unable to reach a unanimous verdict on charges of second-degree murder and other crimes in connection with the Jan. 29, 2022, death of John O’Keefe.
The defense did not call key figures central to the theory it laid out in those initial proceedings — that Read was the victim of a biased police investigation and a plot that sought to frame her for the killing — and opted instead for a series of experts whose testimony sought to dismantle the prosecution’s evidence.
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Among them were three crash reconstruction specialists and two pathologists. Also called to the witness stand was a snowplow driver who offered what was perhaps the defense's most direct challenge to the case Norfolk County special prosecutor Hank Brennan had presented.
Blizzardlike conditions descended on the Boston area on Jan. 29, and the driver, Brian Loughran, testified that before the snow grew heavy, he made multiple passes on the residential street in Canton where O’Keefe was found unresponsive.
O’Keefe was discovered near a flagpole in the front yard of a now-retired Boston police sergeant, Brian Albert, shortly after 6 a.m. — a little over three hours after, Loughran said, he first passed the home in his plow, nicknamed “Frankentruck” for what he described as its mismatch of parts.
Loughran said he knew the Albert family — he used to deliver pizzas for Brian Albert’s brother — and he testified that he could clearly see from his truck to Albert’s front door.
“What was on the ground in the area of the flagpole?” defense attorney David Yanetti asked.
“Nothing,” Loughran responded.
“Did you see a 6-foot-1, 216-pound man lying on that lawn?” Yanetti asked.
“No,” Loughran said.
After a night of drinking, O’Keefe was supposed to have gone to a gathering at Albert’s home early Jan. 29. Brennan has said he never made it inside. Although prosecutors presented no direct evidence of the collision that they said mortally wounded O’Keefe, vehicle data presented at trial showed Read suddenly reversing her Lexus at 12:32 a.m. at 24 mph in front of Albert’s home.
An accident reconstruction expert called by Brennan testified that dozens of abrasions found on O’Keefe’s right arm were consistent with injuries caused by the broken right taillight on Read’s SUV.
Read has said she dropped O’Keefe off outside Albert’s home and watched him enter. Her lawyers have said he was most likely beaten at the gathering — perhaps because she had recently flirted with, then ghosted, a federal agent who was also at the event — before O'Keefe was bitten by Albert’s German shepherd, dragged outside and left in the snow. (Albert and the agent, Brian Higgins, have denied playing roles in O'Keefe's death.)
One of the defense witnesses, a former emergency room doctor and forensic pathologist who said she had seen hundreds of dog bites in her career, testified that the dozens of abrasions on O’Keefe’s arm were not from a broken taillight but from a dog.
The defense’s final witness, a biomedical engineer who examined whether O’Keefe’s injuries were the result of a collision, testified Wednesday that they were not. Experiments conducted for the case using crash test dummies showed that at speeds of 24 mph, there most likely would have been more damage to Read’s car and to O’Keefe’s arm, said the engineer, Andrew Rentschler.
Absent from the witness stand were three people whose testimony played an outsized role in the first trial: Albert, Higgins and former Massachusetts State Trooper Michael Proctor.
Proctor, who was fired after an internal investigation found that he sent derogatory texts about Read and shared confidential investigative details with non-law enforcement personnel, acknowledged during the first trial that he said “unprofessional” things about Read. But he rejected the defense’s claims that he led a biased investigation.
The defense mentioned Proctor repeatedly during Read’s retrial, with defense attorney Alan Jackson at one point asking his supervisor whether his conduct tainted their examination of O’Keefe’s death.
“The investigation was done with honor and integrity, and the evidence pointed in one direction,” State Police Sgt. Yuri Bukhenik responded.
