A Massachusetts jury has found Karen Read not guilty in the death of her police officer boyfriend, three years and two high-profile trials later.
Read, 45, was accused of killing John O'Keefe in January 2022 by hitting him with her Lexus SUV and leaving him to die in the snow after a night of heavy drinking. Her defense team blamed O'Keefe's fellow law enforcement officers for killing him in a house fight and dragging his body outside, then tampering with evidence in order to frame Read.
Read had pleaded not guilty to all three charges: second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating under the influence and leaving the scene of a collision resulting in death.
The jury delivered their verdict on Wednesday, finding Read guilty on only one charge: operating a vehicle under the influence. As she was cleared of the most serious charges, Read hugged her lawyers — as booming cheers could be heard from the crowd gathered outside.
Judge Beverly Cannone sentenced Read to one year of probation on the charge of operating a vehicle under the influence, the standard consequence for a first-time offender.
Immediately afterward, local TV feeds showed Read's many supporters, most clad in pink, cheering and clapping outside the courthouse steps, with some chanting "Free Karen Read."
A short while later Read emerged outside the courthouse, placing her hand on her chest and smiling at the crowd. As they walked down the steps, she and members of her legal team made the American Sign Language "I love you" sign, which had become a silent show of support for Read from those gathered during the trial.
"I just want to say two things," Read said at the podium. "Number one is I could not be standing here without these amazing supporters who have supported me and my team financially and more importantly, emotionally, for almost four years. And the second thing I want to say is no one has fought harder for justice for John O'Keefe than I have, than I have and my team."
Read's first trial ended in a mistrial in July 2024 after jurors were unable to reach a unanimous verdict. Her second trial, which began in April, included 31 days of testimony, a combined 49 witnesses and plenty of dramatic moments before jurors began deliberations on Friday.
The second time around, Read's lawyers argued that the police investigation was so flawed and biased that prosecutors couldn't even prove Read had hit O'Keefe with her car. Defense attorney Alan Jackson kicked off his closing argument by saying: "There was no collision. There was no collision. There was no collision."
Prosecutors didn't try to persuade jurors that Read intended to murder O'Keefe, just that she intentionally reversed her car despite knowing it could kill him.
"She doesn't even have to know she hit him, but she did," prosecutor Hank Brennan said in his closing argument. "She did, and she left a man who was kind and generous and thoughtful, she left him alone. She left him alone to die."
The most serious of the charges facing Read, second-degree murder, carries a sentence of life imprisonment.
A refresher on the case
Some facts of the case are undisputed: O'Keefe, 46, was a 16-year veteran of the Boston Police Department who was raising his niece and nephew. Read, now 45, had worked as an equity analyst and adjunct professor at her alma mater, Bentley University.
The pair had been dating for about two years on the night of Jan. 28, 2022, when they went out drinking in the Boston suburb of Canton.
Shortly after midnight, Read dropped O'Keefe off at a gathering at the home of Brian Albert, a now-retired Boston police officer. Around 6 a.m. the next morning, after O'Keefe didn't return home or respond to calls, Read and two other women found him lying unresponsive in the snow outside Albert's house.
O'Keefe was pronounced dead at a local hospital two hours later, with his cause of death later ruled blunt impact injuries to the head and hypothermia. Police said later that they had found drops of blood, a broken cocktail glass and shards from Read's car's taillight at the scene.
Over the course of both trials, each side sought to fill in the gaps with their competing narratives.
Prosecutors alleged that Read and O'Keefe's relationship had grown strained, and that they had been fighting that night. They said she hit him while making a three-point turn out of Albert's driveway and left him for dead in the middle of a blizzard.
They pointed to angry voicemails Read left O'Keefe after dropping him off, and her comments at the scene the next morning. An emergency responder testified that upon discovering O'Keefe's body, Read repeatedly said: "I hit him." Read has since said in interviews that she was phrasing it as a question and could not have hit him, even unintentionally.
Read's lawyers alleged that after she dropped O'Keefe off, one or more police officers beat him up during a fight inside Albert's home, then dumped him outside.
They cited forensic experts who said O'Keefe's injuries — and the damage to Read's car — were inconsistent with a collision. They also argued O'Keefe had been attacked by Albert's German shepherd, citing injuries on his arm that experts testified were indicative of dog bites.
They said either Read broke her taillight by hitting O'Keefe's parked car while exiting the driveway at his house as she left to look for him, or state police tampered with it after seizing her car in order to plant evidence at the crime scene.
Read's lawyers cited examples of sloppy, if not suspicious, policing in the immediate aftermath, from officers scooping up blood samples in borrowed plastic cups to not searching inside Albert's house. They say the ensuing investigation was similarly unsound, resulting in no physical or medical evidence to prove O'Keefe was even hit by a car.
Both sides agree that one of the people at the gathering — Jennifer McCabe, Albert's sister-in-law and O'Keefe's friend — searched online for "hos [sic] long to die in cold" that morning, but disagreed on exactly when that happened.
The defense argued that the search was time-stamped 2:27 a.m., hours before O'Keefe was found dead. But the prosecution argued that the search was actually made around 6:24 a.m., after his body was discovered. Two experts for the prosecution corroborated that during the second trial, and noted that the search was made in a browser that had been opened at 2:27 a.m.
Highlights from the second trial
Read's second trial examined much of the same evidence, witnesses and questions as the first, with some exceptions.
Read herself never took the stand, though prosecutors in the second trial regularly played video clips from interviews she had done since the first. The intervening months saw growing national interest in Read's case, fueled in part by extensive media coverage and an HBO docuseries.
The second trial featured dozens of witnesses, from law enforcement to forensic experts to O'Keefe's loved ones — including his mom, as well as several friends who were with him that night.
It was similarly packed with notable storylines, from dueling demonstrations outside the courthouse (forcing the judge to extend the buffer zone) to an air conditioning debacle (it was too loud, so heat delayed the proceedings) to the defense's two unsuccessful motions for a mistrial (more on that below).
One of the most notable differences between the two trials was who did not appear at the second: Michael Proctor, the former Massachusetts state trooper who was the lead investigator in the case and the commonwealth's star witness the first time around.
In the first trial, Proctor admitted from the stand that he had sent sexist and crude texts about Read to friends, family and coworkers — including mocking her medical condition, joking about finding nude photos and wishing she would "kill herself." However, he insisted they had "zero impact on the facts and evidence and integrity of the investigation." He said the same was true about his friendships with members of the Albert family, which Read's lawyers argued was a conflict of interest.
Proctor was suspended without pay days later. In March 2025 — just weeks before the second trial began — he was dishonorably discharged after the State Police Trial Board found him guilty of unsatisfactory performance and consumption of alcohol on duty, a decision his lawyer has said they are appealing. While he wasn't in the room during the second trial, Proctor was referenced repeatedly.
"This case was corrupted from the start," Jackson, the defense lawyer, said in closing arguments. "It was corrupted by biases and conflicts and personal loyalties that you heard about, and most fatally, it was corrupted by a lead investigator whose misconduct infected every single part of this case from the top to the bottom."
The threat of another mistrial
Read's first trial ended in a hung jury, forcing Judge Cannone to declare a mistrial. The jury of six men and six women declared themselves at an impasse after multiple days of deliberation, unable to reach a unanimous verdict on all three charges.
"The divergence in our views are not rooted in a lack of understanding or effort but deeply held convictions that each of us carry, ultimately leading to a point where consensus is unattainable," they wrote in a letter to Cannone.
After the trial ended, however, multiple jurors came forward to say they had all agreed that Read was not guilty of murder or leaving the scene, but had been confused about how to deliver a partial verdict.
Read's lawyers then filed multiple appeals — all the way to the Supreme Court — arguing that double jeopardy should prevent Read from being retried on the charges the jury had allegedly agreed on. Their efforts were unsuccessful, paving the way for Read's retrial this spring.
Even as the second trial played out, Read's team tried twice to get Cannone to declare a mistrial, motions that she rejected.
The first request, in early June, followed the second day of questioning of a defense expert witness about whether there was evidence of dog DNA on O'Keefe's sweatshirt — which had not been presented to the jury until that point.
The following week, Read's attorneys accused Brennan, the prosecutor, of pulling a "stunt" by asking a witness if holes in the back of that sweatshirt could have been caused by a backwards fall. Brennan later told the court he had made a mistake, and the judge confirmed to jurors that the holes had been made by a criminologist who had examined the evidence after the fact.
After the defense rested its case on June 11, Read told reporters outside the courthouse that she felt her case was strong but still worried about possible confusion on the part of the jury, saying it would be important to have an "even keener eye" on the instructions and verdict form given to them.
On Friday afternoon, shortly after the jury began deliberations, Read's team filed a motion to change the verdict slip for the manslaughter charge, arguing in favor of adding individual "not guilty" boxes for each of the four counts, versus a single "not guilty" box. Cannone denied the motion without a hearing, according to CBS News, writing that the slip "is consistent with Massachusetts law."
300x250 Ad
300x250 Ad