Attorneys for both sides in the Karen Read murder trial told jurors that the other side was trying to get them to look away from the true facts of the case.
“Look the other way,” is what defense attorney Alan Jackson said the prosecution and its witnesses repeatedly asked jurors to do throughout their presentation of the trial. It was a phrase he used as a motif throughout his closing, which came first.
“The incontrovertible fact is that you’ve been lied to in this courtroom,” he said. “You’re the only thing standing between Karen Read and the tyranny of injustice.”
Likewise, prosecutor Adam Lally said that the defense has done nothing but invent a conspiracy theory so jurors will look away from the physical evidence he says points toward Read striking victim Boston police Officer John O’Keefe with her Lexus SUV on Jan. 29, 2022.
“It’s a three-card monte trick. Don’t pay attention to the facts and evidence,” Lally said, “because it will lead to the defendant is guilty.
Defense
The major theme of Jackson’s closing is the police investigation that he says went far beyond mistakes and incompetence, but straight to the heights of corruption.
“Ladies and gentlemen, there’s a cover-up in this case, plan and simple,” Jackson said.
Lead investigator Massachusetts State Police Trooper Michael Proctor, he said, not only had awful things to say in private text messages about Read as he investigated her — including wishing that she would commit suicide — but actively worked to frame her.
He said the car was in Proctor’s possession before any taillight pieces were discovered, and that every piece of evidence was manipulated by Proctor to make sure it never pointed toward the owner of 34 Fairview Road, where O’Keefe would die, because he was also a Boston cop.
“Michael Proctor didn’t just draw a thin blue line, he erected a thick blue wall … A place you folks are not invited, We protect our own, it’s us and it’s them. And, by the way, who is she after all? … It was going to be easy, or so they thought.”
Prosecution
Lally used a very detailed timeline of Read’s actions on Jan. 28-29, 2022, as an exhibit to guide his own closing. But he led it off with the same quote he used at Read’s initial lower-court arraignment in early February 2022: “‘I hit him, I hit him, I hit him.’”
“‘This is all my fault, this is all my fault, I did this,’” he quoted again, saying that jurors heard first responder after first responder testify that Read said this while standing around O’Keefe’s body shortly after 6 a.m. that morning.
“That’s what the defendant said at the scene,” he said. “Since then, the story has changed a little bit. But those were the words she used on Jan. 29, 2022.”
Other court matters
A female juror, a white woman roughly in her 40s, was dismissed at the top of the day. She was brought up to sidebar multiple times before ultimately being dismissed a little after 10 a.m. This reporter saw her escorted out the back door of the courthouse.
“You may notice that one of your fellow jurors is not sitting with us today,” Judge Beverly Cannone told the remaining jurors when court began in earnest. “I can assure you that is because of an issue that is personal to that juror.”
Cannone began giving her jury instructions at about 12:20 p.m.
This is a developing story.
Background
Jurors will begin deliberating the fate of Karen Read, a Mansfield woman accused of murdering her boyfriend John O’Keefe outside a Canton home in 2022, today after sitting for testimony over the better part of two months. Both sides will present their final arguments to jurors this morning.
One juror was dismissed this morning, delaying the closing arguments.
The prosecution
Read, 44, faces charges of second-degree murder, motor vehicle manslaughter and leaving the scene of a collision causing the death of O’Keefe, a 16-year Boston Police officer when he died at age 46 in the early morning hours of Jan. 29, 2022. Her trial began on April 29 and has spanned 30 in-court days at Norfolk Superior Court in Dedham, including 29 days of testimony.
Prosecutors have argued that taillight pieces found at the snowy scene of O’Keefe’s death on the front lawn of 34 Fairview Road in Canton, heavy drinking the evening before, and a demonstrated history of jealousy and unrest in the relationship between Read and O’Keefe points to her guilt. Prosecutor Adam Lally argues the Mansfield financial analyst and Bentley University lecturer purposely struck him with her car as she dropped him off at that house sometime after midnight.
To expand on this theory, prosecutor Adam Lally called on 68 witnesses. The cast included minor figures like people who had just had some drinks with Read and O’Keefe in the hours before his death but weren’t that close, to long-time friends who could opine on any changes to the relationship. There were some witnesses whose role was similarly limited but critical, like two sisters who testified that Read blew up at O’Keefe during a trip to Aruba when she suspected that he made out with another woman.
Then there were the Canton cops and paramedics who testified, variously, that Read either made incriminating statements at the scene of O’Keefe’s death like “I hit him, I hit him, I hit him” or that she simply questioned whether she could have hit him. Then there were the Massachusetts State Police investigators who detailed their case, from locating broken taillight fragments and a drinking glass resembling the one O’Keefe left his last bar with as well as a single shoe and his hat buried in the snow. Forensic scientists testified that a hair below the taillight of Read’s vehicle made a match to O’Keefe to a stupendously high mathematical degree.
The defense
The defense has a significantly different view of the case. During cross-examination of prosecution witnesses, the defense slowly built up the idea of a nefarious plot: that someone or multiple people inside 34 Fairview Road — the home whose yard O’Keefe’s body would be found partially buried in the snow — beat him to death and placed his body there. Read’s role in this plot was simply an easy mark for the murderers and those involved in the conspiracy to place the blame so the real murderers could walk free.
Over the last two days of trial, Friday and Monday, the defense called only six witnesses before resting its case.
On Friday, the three witnesses promoted the conspiracy version of events. A Canton snow plow operator testified that he saw another car outside the home during a critical hour. A doctor testified that wounds to O’Keefe’s right arm looked like dog bites and claw marks — the defense has said the dog of the home, Chloe, could have participated in the fatal attack. And a computer forensics expert said that he believed a key witness made the suspicious search “hos long to die in cold” hours before O’Keefe’s body would be found, pointing toward conspiracy.
On Monday, the defense called three more witnesses they used to poke holes in the prosecution’s theory of events. A forensic pathologist backed up the Friday doctor’s dog-bite theory but also testified that no matter what context or additional evidence is present, a vehicle-pedestrian strike would always result in significant bruising to the victim, which O’Keefe did not display. Two consulting forensic scientists originally employed in the federal probe of the investigation, a detail that jurors do not know about, testified that the science does not back the theory of a vehicle strike whatsoever.
