The latest on the Karen Read murder case
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‘I would have taken a bullet for John O’Keefe,’ Brian Albert says as he reflects on Karen Read verdict
The former 34 Fairview Road homeowner said the theory that Read was framed in a law enforcement conspiracy is “preposterous and silly.”
Hounded by conspiracy theories and coverup claims, the retired Boston police sergeant who owned the Canton home at the center of Karen Read’s murder case said he “would have taken a bullet” for Read’s boyfriend, John O’Keefe.
Brian Albert spoke to ABC News Thursday, one day after Read was acquitted of killing O’Keefe outside Albert’s home in January 2022.
“I would have taken a bullet for John O’Keefe, because he was a fellow cop,” he said of O’Keefe, a 16-year veteran of the Boston Police Department.
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Appearing with his wife, Nicole, and other family members, Albert flatly denied allegations Read was framed in a law enforcement coverup. While Read’s lawyers have long suggested O’Keefe met his fate inside 34 Fairview Road after arriving at an afterparty, Albert was adamant O’Keefe never entered the house.
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“You do realize, for this conspiracy to be true, it would take 30 to 50 people,” Albert told ABC News’s Matt Gutman. “You’d have to have multiple cops on two different police departments, multiple civilians, the medical examiner, firemen, EMTs, you name it. That’s how preposterous and silly this is.”
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He added: “I don’t understand how people bought this.”
But jurors Wednesday found Read not guilty of second-degree murder and leaving the scene of a fatal accident in O’Keefe’s death, only convicting her on a drunk driving charge. She will serve one year of probation.
Throughout Read’s case, her lawyers sought to implicate the Alberts in their coverup claim, even naming Brian Albert as a possible third-party culprit in O’Keefe’s killing.
Brian and Nicole Albert said they only learned of O’Keefe’s death after Read and two other women, Kerry Roberts and Jennifer McCabe (Nicole’s sister), found O’Keefe unresponsive on the snowy lawn. McCabe, who had attended the afterparty at 34 Fairview Road hours earlier, burst into the Alberts’ bedroom early on Jan. 29, 2022.
“She was just upset, and I immediately thought something had happened to one of her children or one of my children, because why else is she in my bedroom at 6:30 in the morning right now?” Nicole Albert recalled.
“She said, ‘John’s — John’s out front. John, I think John’s dead out front,’” Brian Albert added. “I said, ‘What the [expletive] are you talking about, Jen?’ … I didn’t understand what she was talking about, because why would John be out in front of my house?”
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Defense attorneys have repeatedly lambasted Brian Albert, a trained first responder, because he didn’t step outside and investigate or assist emergency crews as they worked on O’Keefe.
“I’m not a Canton police officer; I’m a Boston police officer,” he said in response. “I was just woken up out of a cold sleep from hanging out the night before. By the time I came downstairs, the police were already in my house. John was already gone. There was nobody to save.”
He added: “What am I supposed to do, run out front in my underwear and start running yellow tape around the fire hydrant?”
Joining Albert and his wife in the ABC News interview were his brother, Chris Albert, and McCabe and her husband, Matthew McCabe. All five drank with O’Keefe and Read at the Waterfall Bar & Grille the night O’Keefe died.
The families previously spoke out in a statement Wednesday, calling Read’s verdict “a devastating miscarriage of justice.”
“We took what we thought was the high road: let the court do its job,” Matt McCabe said of their decision not to speak out earlier.
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Chris Albert added: “I think the reason we all stayed quiet is because we were just witnesses. This is a thing that we … had nothing to do with.”
The Alberts and McCabes said they’ve been called “murderers” as speculation about O’Keefe’s death ran rampant.
“Anybody who’s touched this case has been called a murderer at some point,” Matt McCabe said.
“And anyone who’s friends with us supports cop killers,” Jen McCabe added, citing another oft-repeated allegation.
They’ve also received threats of violence, according to Brian Albert.
“Whether it’s phone calls, text messages, emails, crazy Unabomber-type letters to people’s houses,” he explained.
According to Chris Albert, the conspiracy theories and online true crime sleuthing removes an element of humanity from those involved in the case.
“What they’ve done is they dehumanized us to the sense where we’re not real people,” he told Gutman. “We’re almost like caricatures. We’re just, we’re pawns.”
Brian Albert also raised concerns about the precedent Read’s case sets, particularly for witnesses linked to an alleged crime scene through happenstance.
“The blueprint is, pick out where this is, destroy their reputations, attack them, malign them, torture them, torture their kids, torture anybody that ever knew them. Make them not testify,” he said. “And while doing so, taint the jury pool.”
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Chris Albert touched on the backlash and scrutiny the Alberts and McCabes have seen in their native Canton since the start of Read’s case.
“You get down, you get depressed,” he acknowledged. “But this is the town we, like, grew up in. Like, we didn’t do anything wrong. We all contributed to our town; we love our town. Why should we have to go anywhere?”
Watch the ABC News interview with the Alberts and McCabes:
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