Massachusetts prosecutors have requested access to new evidence and revealed a new person will be called to testify while preparing for Karen Read‘s case to return to court. Read’s first trial ended in a hung jury in July. The retrial is expected to start Jan. 27, 2025, although prosecutors have now requested a postponement to April.
Read, 44, is accused of hitting her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O’Keefe, with her car after a fight and a night of heavy drinking in Jan. 2022, and leaving him to die in frigid temperatures on the lawn of a house where the couple had attended a house party. Witnesses said they overheard Read say, “I hit him” when O’Keefe was found dead the next morning.
Read denies the accusations, and her defense team says there were other law enforcement officers at the party that night who had reason to beat O’Keefe, leave him outside, and then frame Read for the crime, NBC News reported. Read’s defense says she left O’Keefe alive at the party, and woke up the next morning and found him gone. Read says she returned to the house where she left her boyfriend alive, and found him dead on the lawn.
Details of the case and the suggestion that law enforcement had conspired against Read caused her first trial to go viral amid public support for Read’s innocence. The judge in the case has not yet officially ruled on the prosecution’s request to delay Read’s retrial start date.
Phone record and Read’s dad might take the stand
At a Massachusetts court hearing Tuesday, prosecutors requested phone records from Read’s parents, alleging she called her father after they said Read hit O’Keefe with her SUV, suggesting she was aware she did something wrong. Prosecutors have also said they intend to call Read’s father to the stand.
“Ms. Read calls her father and her mother a little after one o’clock on the night she struck and killed John O’Keefe,” Special Assistant District Attorney Hank Brennan said at the hearing about the new evidence.
Brennan added, “She calls both of them and those calls were unanswered according to the phone records. The inference that a 40-something-year-old woman is calling her parents at 1:30 in the morning after this tumultuous event, the inference is strong evidence that Ms. Read knew she had done something terrible.”
According to Rhode Island WJAR, Read’s defense said prosecutors already had access to phone records, which showed their client only called her family after O’Keefe’s body was found.
In her first trial, Read’s defense said O’Keefe was beaten and not struck by a vehicle, and that he’d been bitten by the homeowner’s dogs, meaning he had gone inside the house rather than killed outside, as prosecutors allege. They also questioned evidence from Read’s vehicle, saying the damage to the SUV was inconsistent with hitting someone.
After hours of deliberation after Read’s first trial, the jury said, “Despite our rigorous efforts, we continue to find ourselves at an impasse. Our perspectives on the evidence are starkly divided. Some members of the jury firmly believe that the evidence surpasses the burden of proof establishing the elements of the charges beyond reasonable doubt.”
The jurors added, “Conversely, others find the evidence fails to meet this standard and does not sufficiently establish the necessary elements of the charges. The deep division is not due to a lack of effort or diligence, but rather a sincere adherence to our individual principles and moral convictions. To continue to deliberate would be futile and only serve to force us to compromise these deeply held beliefs.”
Published: Nov 27, 2024 03:23 pm