Fate of Karen Read now in jury’s hands as murder trial reaches critical phase

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Deliberations are underway in the Karen Read murder trial.

After both sides gave their closing arguments Friday morning, Judge Beverly Cannone spent the early afternoon reading jury instructions before alternates were selected and the remaining jurors were sent to the deliberation room.

Cannone selected Juror No. 5 to be the foreperson. The court clerk randomly pulled Nos. 13, 7, 6, 17, 2, and 8 as alternates. 

Read, 45, is accused of slamming her 2021 Lexus SUV into O’Keefe and leaving him to die on the ground in a blizzard on Jan. 29, 2022. Jurors heard more than 30 days of testimony in a trial that began on April 22.

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Special prosecutor Hank Brennan wrapped up his closing argument in the murder trial of Karen Read Friday afternoon, telling jurors there is no doubt that she’s the one who killed John O’Keefe, her 46-year-old boyfriend, a Boston cop and the adoptive father of his orphaned niece and nephew.

“She was drunk. She hit him.  And she left him to die,” Brennan said. “It’s that simple.”

Multiple witnesses testified that they heard her repeating the phrase, “I hit him. I hit him. I hit him,” Brennan said. But it was the hard data – not accident reconstruction or witness accounts, that proves his case, he said.

O’Keefe’s phone did not move from between the time Read allegedly slammed her 6,000-pound LX 570 in reverse until he was discovered dead on the lawn 5 and a half hours later.

Although Read didn’t testify in her own defense, Brennan used her own words against her in the form of multiple televised interviews she sat for.

He alleged that they illustrate that she knowingly left O’Keefe to die after hitting him and where to find the body when she went looking the next morning.

In one, she described O’Keefe as a “weird-shaped lump” and a “buffalo on the prairie,” jutting out of the snow.

“John O’Keefe is not a body. John O’Keefe is not a buffalo on a prairie,” Brennan said. “He was a person, and he was murdered by Karen Read.”

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Read’s lead defense lawyer Alan Jackson urged jurors to find her not guilty Friday in a closing argument that disputed the prosecution’s entire timeline from the night O’Keefe died.

“There was no collision,” Jackson told jurors. “There was no collision. There was no collision.”

He argued that a sloppy investigation, a lack of physical evidence and witness testimony left a mountain of reasonable doubt in the case. He said the commonwealth’s case is “cooked” after an expert analysis of O’Keefe’s injuries and called the prosecution’s crash reconstruction a “ridiculous blue paint kindergarten project.”

The lead homicide detective got fired from the Massachusetts State Police and did not testify at trial.

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The case is expected to go to jurors later this afternoon after more than 30 days of testimony.

Although Judge Beverly Cannone asked for an earlier start than normal, court kicked off with a sidebar conference that lasted over a half-hour.

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Read faces 15 years to life in prison if convicted on the top charge of second-degree murder. If convicted of drunken driving manslaughter, she would face 5 to 20.