Opening statements in the high-profile murder trial surrounding the 2022 death of a Boston police officer drilled Monday into two key questions that have long dominated the case: Is the officer’s girlfriend a killer? Or is she a victim of a sprawling coverup involving law enforcement?
Karen Read is accused of backing her black Lexus SUV into her boyfriend, Officer John O’Keefe, after a night of barhopping that January and leaving him to die in the snow. The 46-year-old was found dead hours later outside the home of another police officer in the Boston suburb of Canton.
Assistant District Attorney Adam Lally laid out the prosecution’s theory of the case, saying Read is guilty of striking O’Keefe with her car, “knocking him back to the ground … causing the bleeding in his brain, the swelling … and then leaving him there for several hours, in a blizzard, with temperatures in the teens … (and) snow piling up on his body.”
The relationship between Read and O’Keefe had soured in the weeks before his death, Lally told jurors, saying that Read had accused him of flirting with another woman during a New Year’s vacation in Aruba. The couple engaged in a “screaming match” for about 20 minutes during the trip, and their troubled relationship was reflected in text messages that will be revealed during the trial, Lally added.
But the defense said Read was framed as part of a cover-up to protect the homeowner and other people inside the house that night. They allege O’Keefe was badly injured during a fight inside the home — including being mauled by the homeowners’ German Shepherd — before being tossed outside in the yard to die.
“It was no accident that John O’Keefe was found dead on the front lawn” of the home on Fairview Road, defense attorney David Yannetti told jurors.
“At that address lived a well-known and well-connected law enforcement family in Canton,” he added. “Because the others were involved and because they had close connections to the investigators in this case, Karen Read was framed for a murder she did not commit.”
“Someone — not Karen Read — ambushed John O’Keefe,” Yannetti said. “Somebody probably did not mean to kill him. But somebody went too far.”
Read, 44, has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder, vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated and leaving the scene of a collision.
The trial started in earnest Monday after two weeks of jury selection and caps the latest chapter in a tumultuous case that has sharply divided the town 20 miles south of Boston. Residents have spent months debating potential scenarios of what happened that fateful night
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