The latest on the Karen Read murder case
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Karen Read murder trial: John O’Keefe’s mother chokes up as she recalls the day he was killed
Karen Read’s murder retrial continued Wednesday as additional witnesses took the stand, including John O’Keefe’s mother.
On the stand Wednesday:
- Daniel Whitley, Canton Fire Department
- Trooper Nicholas Guarino, Massachusetts State Police
- Margaret O’Keefe, Canton, MA
- Kerry Roberts, Canton, MA
4:20 p.m. update: Karen Read exhibited ‘bizarre’ behavior on the ride to the hospital, firefighter says
Canton firefighter and paramedic Daniel Whitley said first responders received orders to take Karen Read to the hospital for a mental health evaluation after she found her boyfriend unresponsive in the snow on Jan. 29, 2022.
He said Read was “pretty upset” and crying, but generally compliant.
“She was arguing that she really didn’t need to go to the hospital, and we were trying to convince her to go to the hospital because once the Section 12 [order] is written, it doesn’t matter what the patient says,” Whitley explained, adding, “It is not a voluntary order.”
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He said Read’s emotions fluctuated as they traveled to the hospital.
“She kept asking if there was any chance her husband [sic] could be alive, even sitting outside in the snow with no coat on for many hours,” Whitley recalled. He said firefighters tried to “give her hope” by telling her about hypothermia cases where patients miraculously survived with no deficits.
“She would go from pretty upset, crying,” Whitley said. “[There was] one instance where she kept saying, ‘I can’t take care of these kids. I can’t take care of these kids. They’re not my kids, and they’re not his kids.’”
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He said he realized at that point Read was talking about John O’Keefe, who was well known around Canton for taking custody of his niece and nephew after their parents died.
“So I said, ‘Listen, it’s OK. It looks like you have a very strong support system,’” Whitley testified.
He said Read lifted her head at that point and asked if he knew Kerry Roberts, O’Keefe’s longtime friend and one of the two women who accompanied Read that morning on her search for her missing boyfriend. When Whitley confirmed he did, Read allegedly replied, “Anybody who knows Kerry Roberts wouldn’t say that about her.”
“I said, ‘Well, she did come out early in the morning to look for your husband in a blizzard,’” he recalled. “And [Read] just rolled her eyes and put her head back down. I thought it was just bizarre.”
Judge Beverly Cannone struck the last part of Whitley’s response from the record following an objection from the defense.
On cross-examination, defense attorney David Yannetti noted Whitley testified last year that Read spoke about Roberts with a “snarky” tone. He pointed out Whitley didn’t use that descriptor when he first spoke with police in February 2022.
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Yannetti then sought to highlight the firefighter’s connections with two key figures in the case. Whitley had previously testified he lives in the same neighborhood as Roberts and previously volunteered to supply a firetruck to a block party she organized. Yannetti also noted Whitley went to school with former Massachusetts State Police Trooper Michael Proctor, the lead investigator on the case.
“You did not go to school with Karen Read, right?” Yannetti asked.
“No, not to my knowledge,” Whitley replied.
“You didn’t help coordinate neighborhood block parties with Karen Read, right?” Yannetti continued.
No, Whitley said.
“She was a stranger to you on Jan. 29, 2022, correct?” Yannetti pressed.
“She was a patient of mine, yes,” Whitley answered.
“Well, as far as you knew, she was an outsider to Canton, correct?” Yannetti fired back.
“I did not know that,” Whitley replied.
Cannone sent jurors home for the day around 4 p.m.
3:20 p.m. update: Trooper testifies about accessing phone data
Massachusetts State Police Trooper Nicholas Guarino briefly testified about accessing data from cellphones belonging to several individuals in Karen Read’s case, including the defendant and John O’Keefe.
Guarino said he does phone and computer forensic investigative work for the Norfolk County District Attorney’s Office, having received on-the-job training in digital extraction. Once a device’s contents are downloaded, any later edits or alterations would leave a digital footprint, he explained.
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Special prosecutor Hank Brennan said he plans to recall Guarino for additional testimony later in the trial, and the trooper stepped down.
2:30 p.m. update: John O’Keefe’s mother offers emotional testimony
John O’Keefe’s mother wept on the stand Wednesday as she told jurors about her late son, from his upbringing in Braintree to his selfless decision to raise his young niece and nephew after their parents died in quick succession.
“He was wonderful with the kids,” Peggy O’Keefe recalled.
The morning her son died, O’Keefe was at home in Braintree with her husband, she testified. She said Kerry Roberts, a longtime family friend, called her around 6:15 a.m. with the news that John O’Keefe had been “found in a snowbank.”
Roberts drove the elder O’Keefes to Good Samaritan Medical Center in Brockton, where their son was pronounced dead later that morning. Peggy O’Keefe testified she encountered her son’s girlfriend, Karen Read, at the hospital and said Read asked her, “Peg, is he dead?’”
John O’Keefe “was bruised up,” Peggy O’Keefe recalled. “His eyes were closed. Just not a good scene.”
After leaving the hospital, she returned to John O’Keefe’s house in Canton and focused on consoling her grandchildren. At some point, she said, Read arrived with her father and brother and asked to go upstairs and collect her belongings.
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“I never should have let them go up there, but at the time it was — I just couldn’t think straight, and I really didn’t have anybody else to help me keep them down in the kitchen,” O’Keefe said. “So I don’t know what they got up there, what they did up there.”
She testified she didn’t see the Reads exit, and she denied confronting Read with any accusations during the time she was there. Read’s lawyers declined to cross-examine O’Keefe.
“Mrs. O’Keefe, I’m very, very sorry for your loss,” defense attorney Alan Jackson said. “I have no questions for you.”
1:30 p.m. update: Kerry Roberts says Karen Read asked her, ‘Do you think I hit him?’
As she frantically searched for her boyfriend, John O’Keefe, the morning of Jan. 29, 2022, Karen Read turned her attention to the broken taillight on her SUV, Kerry Roberts recalled Wednesday.
Read, Roberts, and a third woman — Jennifer McCabe — teamed up to search for O’Keefe after he didn’t return home that night, double checking his house in Canton. Roberts said Read flagged the damaged light as they stood in O’Keefe’s driveway.
“She said, ‘Do you think I hit him?’” Roberts recalled. “And I said, ‘No, I don’t think you hit him. What are you talking about? Let’s just go find him.’”
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She testified a piece was missing from the taillight on the SUV’s passenger side.
“And as you got closer there’s a metal sort of square, and one of the pieces was sort of sticking out,” Roberts added. “And I only remember it because I thought, ‘If someone walks by that, they’re going to catch their jacket on it.’”
The three women set out for 34 Fairview Road, where McCabe’s sister and brother-in-law lived and where Read had dropped O’Keefe off hours earlier. Roberts drove through the rapidly accumulating snow, and she recalled telling a frantic Read to “shut up” and buckle her seat belt.
“It was bad driving. I didn’t want to get into an accident and her not have a seat belt on,” Roberts said, adding, “It was like, you couldn’t control her. And I was trying to drive in a blizzard.”
As they pulled up to 34 Fairview Road, Read ran over to a mound of snow in the shape of a body, and Roberts said she jumped out and followed. She choked up as she recalled brushing the snow off O’Keefe’s face.
“I started to dig around his face and his eyes, and his left eye was fine,” she said. “But his right eye looked like it was huge, like he had had something happen to it. And after that I told Karen to get off him, we were going to start CPR.”
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She wept later as special prosecutor Hank Brennan showed her a photo of O’Keefe’s wounded face to confirm what she saw that morning. As first responders arrived and tended to her childhood friend, Roberts said she called O’Keefe’s parents to fill them in.
“I called Mrs. O’Keefe and told her John had been in an accident, and she screamed, ‘I can’t do this again,’” Roberts testified. Years earlier, O’Keefe’s sister had died of brain cancer and O’Keefe took custody of her two young children.
As she and Read drove away from Fairview Road, Roberts said Read told her, “If anything happens to John, I’m going to kill myself. You’re going to have to take care of the kids.” Soon after, Canton police contacted Roberts and asked her to bring Read back to the scene, as her parents had expressed concern about her mental health.
Roberts also testified she had only met McCabe once before, though they spoke frequently after their shared ordeal.
“I think because we went through something horrific together, we bonded over it,” Roberts explained. She testified she and McCabe teamed up to make a timeline of what happened that morning at the request of O’Keefe’s mother, Peggy.
On cross-examination, defense attorney Alan Jackson pressed Roberts on her communication with investigators and the Norfolk County District Attorney’s Office, particularly DA Michael Morrissey. He also noted Roberts didn’t initially mention Read’s taillight during her first conversation with Massachusetts State Police troopers on Jan. 29.
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“No, I did not,” she confirmed. “I didn’t want to accuse anybody of anything.” She said she told authorities about the taillight during a second interview days later.
Fielding a later question from Jackson, Roberts said she had last spoken with McCabe on Wednesday morning, though she denied discussing her testimony.
“She called to wish me good luck today,” Roberts explained.
Jackson turned his attention to Roberts’s prior testimony before a grand jury, when she testified she heard Read ask McCabe to “Google ‘hypothermia’” as the three women huddled together at Fairview Road. Pressed by Jackson, Roberts acknowledged she didn’t actually hear Read make the request, but learned of it later.
“And the reason you did that, the reason that you said that false statement, was because someone told you to say it, correct?” Jackson asked.
“Nobody told me to say it,” Roberts replied. “I knew it happened at that time, which is why I said it.”
Roberts later clarified she misunderstood the question Assistant District Attorney Adam Lally asked her before the grand jury, though she denied trying to fool or mislead jurors. She explained she knew about Read’s request from the timeline that she and McCabe drafted.
One of the most contentious pieces of evidence in the case is a Google search McCabe made for “hos long to die in cold.” McCabe claims she made the search after finding O’Keefe’s body, and at Read’s insistance, but the defense contends she actually made the search at 2:27 a.m. on Jan. 29.
9:30 a.m. update: ARCCA experts voir dire postponed
Judge Beverly Cannone postponed a voir dire hearing to vet two crash reconstructionists from ARCCA Inc., agreeing to move the proceedings to Monday afternoon in light of a scheduling conflict.
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The engineering consulting firm was initially hired by federal authorities to look into John O’Keefe’s death. Two ARCCA experts, Daniel Wolfe and Andrew Rentschler, testified for the defense during Karen Read’s first trial and said O’Keefe’s fatal head injuries weren’t consistent with getting hit by a car and that damage to Read’s SUV was inconsistent with striking O’Keefe.
Livestream via NBC10 Boston.
Testimony in Karen Read’s murder retrial kicked off this week, with key witness Kerry Roberts expected back on the stand Wednesday.
Roberts was one of two women with Read when she found her boyfriend — Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe — cold and lifeless on a snowy lawn in Canton on Jan. 29, 2022. Prosecutors allege Read drunkenly and deliberately backed her SUV into O’Keefe while dropping him off at an afterparty hours earlier, then left him to die in a blizzard.
However, Read’s lawyers contend she was framed in a vast conspiracy among law enforcement and afterparty guests. They’ve floated an alternate theory that O’Keefe entered 34 Fairview Road and was beaten, attacked by the homeowner’s dog, and ultimately dumped outside in the snow.
Read’s first trial ended in a mistrial last July after jurors returned deadlocked.
More on Karen Read:
The prosecution and defense laid the foundation for their respective cases in opening statements Tuesday, with special prosecutor Hank Brennan painting a vivid picture of the crime scene and giving jurors a taste of some of the science and data he claims points to Read’s guilt. Meanwhile, defense attorney Alan Jackson called the lead Massachusetts State Police investigator on the case, former Trooper Michael Proctor, a “cancer” and accused him of lying and fabricating evidence to protect fellow law enforcement officials present at 34 Fairview Road.
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Read is “the victim of a botched and biased and corrupted investigation that was never about the truth, folks,” Jackson asserted. “It was about preserving loyalty.”
Proctor’s family fired back in a statement, calling Jackson’s opening remarks “yet another example of the distasteful, and shameless fabrication of lies that embodies their defense strategy.”
“Jackson is under no oath to tell the truth; he does not have to speak in truths,” the Proctor family continued. “The defense team continues to do anything to deflect from facts of the case and continues to use inappropriate analogies like casting someone as a cancer. We wholeheartedly believe the truth will prevail in this case, and justice for Officer John O’Keefe and his family will be achieved.”
Roberts, a childhood friend of O’Keefe’s, testified she awoke to a frantic call from Read the morning of Jan. 29.
“The first thing she said was, ‘Kerry, Kerry, Kerry, John’s dead.’ And then she hung up,” Roberts recalled. She testified about the frantic search that ensued.
Jurors on Tuesday also heard from Canton firefighter and paramedic Timothy Nuttall, who tended to O’Keefe at the scene the morning of Jan. 29. Nuttall testified that he asked Read what had happened and she replied, “I hit him, I hit him, I hit him.”
After dismissing jurors for the day, Judge Beverly Cannone heard arguments over whether Read’s lawyers had fulfilled their reciprocal discovery obligations regarding two crash reconstructionists first hired by federal authorities to look into O’Keefe’s death.
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Cannone ordered a voir dire hearing Friday to vet the ARCCA Inc. witnesses, Daniel Wolfe and Andrew Rentschler, before they take the stand. She also ordered the experts to produce all ARCCA records “that reflect or in any way relate to work performed or contemplated and related in any way to billing, payment, compensation and or reimbursement of any kind” in connection with Read’s case.
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