Following the death of her partner, John O’Keefe, a police officer in 2022, Read was charged with second-degree murder as well as other offenses. Read was framed by other officers, according to her attorneys.
Following jurors’ declaration on Monday that they had reached a deadlock in Karen Read’s murder trial—she is the Massachusetts woman accused of killing her boyfriend, a police officer—a judge ruled the case a mistrial.
After a nine-week trial in a courtroom outside of Boston, where Read’s attorneys portrayed the 46-year-old John O’Keefe’s murder as a cover-up orchestrated by law enforcement, the judgment was made on the fifth day of deliberations.
According to the prosecution, Read, 44, and O’Keefe had a turbulent relationship that ended on January 29, 2022, when the financial analyst drove her Lexus SUV into her boyfriend and left him for dead.
Read was accused with second-degree murder, driving while intoxicated, and fleeing the scene of an accident that resulted in death.
The jury foreman expressed in a memo to Judge Beverly Cannone of Norfolk County Superior Court on Monday afternoon that the six men and six women on the panel were unable to reach a consensus, even after intense deliberation. The letter stated that some people thought the evidence was stronger than what was required to convict Read, while others concluded that the prosecution had not proven their case.
“Despite our commitment to the duty entrusted in us, we find ourselves deeply divided by fundamental differences in our opinions and state of mind,” the jury had written to the judge earlier.
Cannone scheduled a status hearing for the case for later this month following the declaration of a mistrial.
The district attorney’s office expressed gratitude to O’Keefe’s family in a statement and stated that the case will be retried by the prosecution.
Reporters were informed outside the courthouse by Read’s attorney, Alan Jackson, that the prosecution had depended on tainted investigators and a corrupted investigation.
He declared, “We will not give up fighting.”
That morning, O’Keefe’s body was discovered to be unresponsive, and he was subsequently declared deceased. The medical examiner determined that hypothermia and blunt force injuries to the head were the cause of his death.
Lawyers for Read claimed that she was set up by police to cover up a beating they claimed O’Keefe received at a party at the house where his death was discovered.
The defense claimed that Massachusetts state trooper Michael Proctor, the case’s chief investigator, falsified evidence, neglected to conduct a thorough investigation into O’Keefe’s death, and disparaged and denigrated Read in a number of texts sent to friends, family, and superiors.
Although Proctor’s messages were “indefensible,” Norfolk County Assistant District Attorney Adam Lally conceded as much in his closing remarks last Tuesday, claiming they had no influence on the objectivity of the agency’s probe.
The Massachusetts State Police verified that Proctor had been “relieved of his duties” in a statement on Monday night.
Colonel John E. Mawn, Jr. released a statement in which he stated that “the department took immediate action to relieve Trooper Michael Proctor of duty and formally transfer him out of the Norfolk County District Attorney’s Office State Police Detective’s Unit.”
Regarding Proctor’s suspected significant misbehavior, the agency had previously launched an internal inquiry, which is still underway.
The defense’s allegation of a cover-up was rejected by Lally as “rampant speculation.”
According to Lally, Read told first responders that she had struck O’Keefe several times. Vehicle data also revealed that, on January 29, after midnight, she had reversed her SUV for 62 feet at a speed of 24 mph close to the residence of another officer, Brian Albert.
Lally stated that there was tangible proof to support the claim that she hit him, such as a taillight that the police claimed was shattered in the crash and O’Keefe’s hair and DNA discovered on the back of the car.
Nobody who was present at the event, according to Lally, remembered seeing O’Keefe inside Albert’s home.
After Read dropped O’Keefe off at Albert’s house, drove home, and fled in a panic a few hours later when she realized her lover had never returned, defense attorney Alan Jackson claimed that the taillight was actually broken.
The defense showed surveillance footage from O’Keefe’s residence, which showed Read backing her SUV into her boyfriend’s car on her way out to find him. According to Jackson, O’Keefe’s iPhone data revealed that he had taken dozens of steps around the time the prosecution claim he was struck, and it’s possible that some of those steps led to Albert’s home’s basement.
In an attempt to disprove the prosecution’s theory of O’Keefe’s death, Read’s attorneys were permitted to present a third-party culprit defense. They identified a potential suspect in O’Keefe’s death as an agent of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives who had exchanged flirtatious texts with Read.
Before the party at Albert’s house, Jackson claimed that Read had neglected him at a bar, which infuriated agent Brian Higgins. According to Jackson, there might have been a fight between Higgins and O’Keefe at Albert’s house over Read, which might have resulted in O’Keefe falling and injuring his head.
Higgins stated in his testimony that he never saw O’Keefe inside Albert’s house and that Read’s disregard for him did not bother him.
A forensic engineer who examined law enforcement’s case management for the Department of Justice, according to The Associated Press, testified that O’Keefe should have suffered more serious injuries if he had been hit by a car going above 20 mph.
