Opening statements in the retrial of Karen Read painted starkly different portraits of the defendant Tuesday, with the prosecution alleging she fatally struck her boyfriend with her SUV as their relationship unraveled and her lawyers arguing she was the victim of law enforcement misconduct and a cover-up.
The theories largely echoed those put forward in Read’s widely publicized first trial on charges of second-degree murder and other alleged crimes in the Jan. 29, 2022, death of Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe. That nine-week trial ended with a hung jury last summer.
But there were notable differences in some of the details prosecutors and defense lawyers presented Tuesday.
Read has repeatedly pressed her case publicly, speaking to reporters outside the courtroom in recent weeks and giving lengthy interviews for documentaries and a magazine story. The lead prosecutor, special counsel Hank Brennan, said he intends to rely on Read’s own words in what he called her “campaign to make public statements.”
“Her statements will confirm what you know from the science and the data,” Brennan told the jury. “You’re going to hear from her own lips — and many of her statements — her admissions to extraordinary intoxication … her admission to being angry at John that night.”
In a clip that Brennan played for the jury, Read, 45, discussed O’Keefe’s death with “Dateline.” In the interview, Read said she “could have tagged him in the knee and incapacitated him. He didn’t look mortally wounded as far as I could see. But could I have done something that knocked him out?”
Prosecutors used the clip to reinforce the theory they have alleged about O’Keefe’s death: Fueled by anger and intoxication, Read backed her Lexus SUV into him after the couple had an argument. According to prosecutors, she left him for dead outside the Boston-area home of Brian Albert, then a police sergeant who was having a gathering that O’Keefe was on his way to.
Read and her lawyers have said she dropped O’Keefe off at Albert’s home around midnight and watched him go inside. According to the defense’s account, when Read awoke hours later, she panicked after having discovered that O’Keefe never came home. She found him unresponsive outside Albert’s home around 6 a.m. the next day, she and her lawyers say.
Defense attorney Alan Jackson countered that the clip Brennan presented to the jury was shown without context. In Jackson’s telling, the “Dateline” interview was presented as if Read were discussing what was going through her mind when she dropped O’Keefe off at midnight, which he argued was not the case.
“She’s talking about 6 a.m. when she found him,” Jackson said, adding that similar statements she made to others were not confessions but the words of a woman “desperately trying to piece together what happened on this tragic night.”
How the defense was able to address former Massachusetts State Trooper Michael Proctor also marked a notable shift.
Proctor led the investigation into O’Keefe’s death, and he was fired after allegations of misconduct raised during the first trial prompted an internal state police investigation. A state panel concluded that he violated agency rules when he sent derogatory texts about Read and shared confidential investigative details with non-law enforcement personnel.
Calling Proctor a “malignancy” that spread throughout the investigation into O’Keefe’s death and Read’s prosecution, Jackson said there was no part of the case that Proctor had not touched.
“He’s been disgraced by his own agency,” Jackson said. “Not by us. By the Massachusetts State Police — investigated, suspended and fired.”
Jackson accused Proctor of conducting a biased and “corrupted” investigation that shielded people he had undisclosed ties with — including Albert — from being scrutinized as possible suspects in O’Keefe’s death. (Albert testified during the first trial that O’Keefe never entered his home the night of his death, though he would have been “welcomed with open arms” if he had.)
Brennan did not mention Proctor in his opening statement, and Proctor has not publicly commented on his termination. His family said the state panel’s decision “unfairly exploits and scapegoats one of their own, a trooper with a 12-year unblemished record.”
During the first trial, Proctor acknowledged that his comments about Read “dehumanized” her but said his conduct did not compromise the integrity of the investigation.
