The high-profile murder trial of a Boston woman accused of murdering her police officer boyfriend has ended with a mistrial.
Karen Read, 44, was told Monday that jurors were unable to agree on whether she’d deliberately killed Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe with her SUV in January 2022.
Read could still face a retrial, following a contentious nine-week trial where she alleged that she was the victim of a wide-ranging plot to frame her.
Prosecutors countered that Read ran over O’Keefe to end their toxic relationship before leaving him for dead in the snow.
Karen Read at her final pretrial hearing on April 12 at Norfolk Superior Court
John O’Keefe, 46, was found dead 6am on January 29, 2022, outside a house where Read dropped him off for an afterparty about 12.45am
O’Keefe’s cause of death was listed as blunt force trauma and hypothermia, with pieces of Read’s taillight found around his body, prosecutors said.
It came after Read and O’Keefe had been drinking with friends at local bars, and were invited back to an afterparty at the home of a retired detective, Brian Albert.
Read decided to go back to O’Keefe’s home to sleep after dropping him off, and according to her version of events, drove back out to find him after waking up at 6am to find he never returned home.
After finding O’Keefe’s body outside the home, which party attendees claimed he never entered, first responders on the scene alleged that Read repeatedly said she hit him in a frenzied state.
Vehicle data also found that Read reversed her SUV for 62 feet at 24mph near to Albert’s home.
In his closing argument on Tuesday, Norfolk County Assistant District Attorney Adam Lally said the claims that Read was framed was little more than ‘rampant speculation.’
Lally also pointed to hair and DNA from O’Keefe found on the rear end of Read’s SUV.
