The Karen Read murder case docket was flooded with some 50 filings since Tuesday, including a formerly sealed motion to dismiss, as the sides finalize issues before the trial begins next week.
Read, 44, of Mansfield, was indicted in June of 2022 for second degree murder, motor vehicle manslaughter and leaving the scene of a collision causing death in the Jan. 29, 2022, death of John O’Keefe, 46, a 16-year member of the Boston Police Department and Read’s boyfriend of two years. Prosecutors say she struck him with her Lexus SUV outside a Canton home after a night of heavy drinking and left him to die in the cold.
The case is set to return to court for a hearing Friday morning ahead of the trial date set for next Tuesday.
Perhaps the most prominent of the filings over the last few days in the case was Norfolk Superior Court Judge Beverly Cannone unsealing a slew of older documents in the case, including the defense’s Jan. 5, 49-page motion to dismiss. Cannone denied the motion, as she did for another one that was public.
In that, defense attorneys found many faults with the prosecutor’s presentation of the case to the grand jury, which they say was “predicated entirely on flimsy speculation and presumption,” and the victim of “questionable and biased investigation.”
They painted a small-town portrait of Canton and Norfolk County in general, one in which the police had very close personal ties to Brian Albert and his family. Albert, a fellow Boston Police Department officer, was the owner of 34 Fairview Road where O’Keefe’s body was discovered in the heavy snow the morning of Jan. 29, 2022, and where Read and O’Keefe planned to go following a night out in downtown Canton with the Brian Albert and other members of the family and others.
In the newly unsealed motion to dismiss, defense attorneys press their argument that the investigators in the case had long-standing relationships with the Alberts. First was Canton Police Department Det. Sgt. Michael Lank, who they say is “a longstanding childhood friend and drinking buddy” of Brian Albert and that he has “a documented history of deputizing himself to ‘investigate’ crimes perpetrated by his longtime childhood friends, the Alberts, to shield them from criminal liability.”
They also say he failed to disclose in his testimony that the Canton PD had moved the case to an outside agency, the Massachusetts State police, because the agency recognized a potential conflict of interest because O’Keefe’s body was found on the lawn of Brian Albert, whose brother Kevin Albert works for the Canton PD.
Then comes MSP Trooper Michael Proctor, who the defense says “is also close family friends of the Alberts.” He is under internal investigation.
The defense also says that “not a single witness” testified that they saw Read strike or injure O’Keefe and the majority of witnesses were brought on simply to present “irrelevant ‘bad character’ and propensity evidence prejudicing the jury against Ms. Read.”
The case has also seen a flurry of motions regarding the trial, some of which are telling of the strategies.
The defense has filed motions to exclude testimony of irrelevant “bad character” of their client, to exclude blood alcohol test evidence, and to both sanction and exclude some evidence “based on the Commonwealth’s failure to timely comply with discovery orders.”
Prosecutors want Judge Cannone to bar the defense from using their established third-party culprit defense, have no discussion of the ongoing federal probe into the police and DA’s investigation into Read’s case, and bar defense experts from testimony involving scientific studies.
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