Jurors in the Karen Read murder trial playing out in a Dedham court are likely to deliberate her fate early this week.
Defense attorneys David Yannetti and Alan Jackson told the Herald they expect to finish with their witnesses Monday, with closing arguments from both sides expected Tuesday. Read’s defense called three witnesses on Friday after the prosecution rested its case.
First up was Canton snowplow driver Brian Loughran, who said he saw a different vehicle outside the yard, where victim John O’Keefe would be found dead or dying, during a critical time. Next was Dr. Marie Russell, who testified that wounds to O’Keefe’s arm appeared in her view to be dog bites and scratches, which points toward the defense’s third-party killer theory. Finally, Richard Green, a computer forensics expert who testified that a key witness named Jennfier McCabe made a suspicious Google search hours before O’Keefe’s body was found, which the defense says points toward conspiracy.
Defense attorneys said they will call three more witnesses Monday: their own forensic pathologist, Dr. Frank Sheridan; and two scientists from the forensic consulting firm ARCCA, Daniel Wolfe and Andrew Rentschler, who were originally employed in the federal probe of the Read investigation and will testify to their conclusions about whether Read struck O’Keefe with her vehicle.
Charges and theories
Read, 44, faces charges of second-degree murder, motor vehicle manslaughter and leaving the scene of a collision causing the death of John O’Keefe, her boyfriend and a 16-year Boston Police officer when he died at age 46 in the early morning hours of Jan. 29, 2022.
Prosecutors have argued that taillight pieces found at the snowy scene of O’Keefe’s death on the front lawn of 34 Fairview Road in Canton, heavy drinking the evening before, and a demonstrated history of jealousy and unrest in the relationship between Read and O’Keefe points to her guilt. Prosecutor Adam Lally argues the Mansfield financial analyst and Bentley University lecturer purposely struck him with her car as she dropped him off at that house sometime after midnight.
But defense attorneys say that something much darker and complex is afoot. In pretrial arguments, they pointed toward others in the home beating O’Keefe to death and framing Read in a massive cover-up — a mixture of both police incompetence and willful bias. While they were barred from making their third-party killer theory a central tenet of their opening arguments, they have, through cross-examination and the first three of their expected six witnesses, attempted to cast heavy doubt on the integrity of the case.
‘A rational jury’
“The court must consider … whether a rational jury could find the elements of the charges beyond a reasonable doubt,” Jackson said in arguing a motion for acquittal after Lally rested his case Friday. “Here, the case the Commonwealth has submitted to the jury after resting is insufficient to meet such a finding.”
The motion, which was made without the jury present and which Judge Beverly Cannone denied, was a sort of roadmap to the case the defense would make with their own witnesses.
Jackson said that the prosecution’s “entire case relies on a theory built on the shoulders of a trooper named Joe Paul,” a Massachusetts State Police crash reconstructionist who began his two days of testimony on June 14. Paul testified that data he obtained from the computers about Read’s Lexus LX570 SUV in conjunction with O’Keefe’s injuries were “consistent with a pedestrian strike.”
“And his theory … is that John O’Keefe’s arm was struck, he was spun around in sort of a pirouette, he was projected 30 feet to the left, hit his head on the curb or the road in the intervening time before coming to a final resting spot about 30 feet away,” Jackson said in his argument. “Calling a witness to simply espouse an opinion, like Trooper Paul did, that belies science, common sense or even logic, that’s not enough to get the case to the jury.”
Jackson further said that the prosecution’s own witness, state medical examiner Dr. Irini Scordi-Bello, testified that in “her professional opinion, the injuries are not classic pedestrian injuries and they are, every single one of them, consistent with a physical altercation.”
Pushing back
Prosecutor Lally has conducted his cross-examinations of the defense witnesses with an energy rarely present in his direct examination of his own witnesses.
For Loughran, Lally brought up a time the plow driver struck a basketball hoop while doing his rounds. The witness’ porous memory of the event and his inability to avoid the obstacle even as he tried to, Lally suggested through his questioning, pointed toward unreliability of his account of seeing a different car outside 34 Fairview Road the night of O’Keefe’s death.
For Russell, Lally questioned her credentials and experience in pathology, making her admit she hadn’t performed an autopsy since the mid-1990s. He also suggested that she jumped to conclusions when she first heard of the case and failed to consider other possibilities.
“I’m an ER doctor, I have to make a diagnosis quickly. I am trained to do that. That’s my specialty,” Russell said during the mildly combative back and forth.
But it was Green that Lally dressed down the most in cross. Green’s testimony that Jennifer McCabe searched for “hos long to die in cold” at 2:27 a.m. on Jan. 29, 2022, differs from that of the Commonwealth’s experts, Jessica Hyde and Ian Whiffin, two experts Green said he knew and who he clearly respected. They both testified that she made the search at 6:34 a.m., as she said she did at the behest of Read as the women were near O’Keefe’s body in the snow.
