Readers sound off on Karen Read, public toilets and a state climate law
Bloomington, Ind.: For those following the Karen Read saga in Massachusetts, it's been a wild ride. I watched the original trial long after it concluded, and I must say, it's quite an adventure. Most who have followed this case know it ended in a hung jury. The second trial is beginning as I write this letter.
For those who may not know, Read is accused of running down her Boston police officer boyfriend with her car after an argument as he was exiting her vehicle to attend a party at a house with mutual friends. Many of them were also police officers. The boyfriend later died from his injuries and exposure to extreme cold weather.
Read was charged with vehicular homicide, leaving the scene of an accident and driving while intoxicated, among other offenses. She maintains her innocence, claiming she saw her boyfriend enter the house, suggesting something must have happened to him inside. His lifeless body was discovered in the front yard near the street the following day. Investigators found fragments of her broken taillight near her boyfriend's body, along with a hair matching his DNA on her bumper.
There has been a curious outpouring of support for Read on social media. Many believe she was framed by those at the party who were the actual murderers and set her up to take the blame. I am shocked that so many find this credible. I must admit that I thought she was guilty after hearing just a few details. After watching the trial, I think you'd have to be a bit nuts to believe otherwise. Scott Thompson
Plainview, L.I.: Major League Baseball has published a list of 500 players being paid multi-million-dollar salaries this season, but Commissioner Rob Manfred still won't give me back the $5.35 check (for my unauthorized 'use' of Mickey Mantle's 1956 Triple Crown statistics of .353, 52 and 130) that he has never cashed since I mailed it to him on May 28, 2020. Richard Siegelman
Manhattan: Re 'Council wants 1,000 new places for people to 'go,' ' (April 11): I see all of these articles about the city building new public toilets but nothing about the public toilets in privately owned buildings. Thanks to the late architect James Morgan, Manhattan Community Board 5 started requiring public toilets in large buildings as one of the requirements for them to obtain a zoning variance for additional floor area ratio (FAR), which gave developers additional space and made the buildings more profitable. The public is supposed to have access to these toilets without any hindrance. It is my understanding that the Department of City Planning has a list of these public toilets in a book called 'Privately Owned Public Space.' I believe that these public toilets should be included in any directory of public toilets. Joan E. Ramer
Glen Ridge, N.J.: I still can't stop shaking my head in disbelief after reading Friday's article 'Has sex with corpse' about that sick piece of dirt who not only robbed a corpse on the R train but then performed oral and anal sex on him. He gives a new meaning to the word depravity. Find him and lock him up. He is too far gone for rehabilitation. Francine Ferrara
Manhattan: Dear ma'am, do not despair. Someone saw you, an 'older' woman on the train tracks in the Bronx. The engineer of the Metro-North train I was riding on eased to a halt. The conductor immediately announced the situation to the passengers. No one grumbled in the first car, which I was riding in. There is nothing more important than saving a life — nothing. Power was turned off. You could hear a pin drop in my train car. NYPD officers arrived forthwith and successfully rescued you. That is a lot of people rooting for you, wishing you well. Most likely, people you don't know. Trust me, ma'am, we New Yorkers have your back. There is hope. Susan A. Stark
Lackawaxen, Pa.: Rabbi Diana Fersko ('At Passover, speak truth on Hamas rape,' op-ed, April 11), while properly decrying man's inhumanity, errs in judgment by citing Oct. 7 as a comparative example. The handful of atrocities on that date hardly 'was one of the largest and most barbaric instances of gender-based violence in all of modernity.' That is, unless there is differential suffering according to race/religion/nationality, since the Nanking Massacre during the Second Sino-Japanese War claimed 20,000-80,000 victims. Of course, those were only Chinese. Prior to and after Oct. 7, Israel has systematically employed sexual violence to subjugate the Palestinian population. Its defense and security forces have proven more 'equal opportunity' in subjecting men and boys to equivalent humiliation, often — when anatomically inadequate to penetrate the Palestinian 'psyche' — utilizing batons, etc. It's mainly documented, and not what one would want served on the Seder plate! John A. MacKinnon
Rockaway, N.J.: It's funny when the stock market goes up and up and we hear that it doesn't help the little guy. But when it goes down, it hurts everyone's 401(k). First of all, it only hurts if you sell low. If you are contributing weekly out of your paycheck, you are buying on sale. It's the only sale Americans don't like. Click on the five-year chart and you will feel better. Stock markets should be for long-term investment. If you are in a three-year window or needing the money, you should have been advised to be in more diversified and stable investments. Michael Ilardi
Eastchester, N.Y.: To Voicer Paul Feiner: Funny how you insinuate that President Trump's tariffs might somehow be benefiting his family and friends. I looked and looked but can't seem to find your letter when Nancy Pelosi and the Biden family benefited. Just saying. Russ Pinto
Malverne, L.I.: I believe Trump has resorted to child's play when he goes tit-for-tat in tariff negotiations. I'm disappointed at his Wharton School education. You can find better economists from CUNY. We know a thing or two about hard work, perseverance and standing in the cold. I'm a middle-aged man fed up with working on cold, dark March mornings and April, too. Help deflect all this negativity and do away with daylight saving time. Springing ahead entails waiting at 7 a.m. when Standard Time is 6 a.m. It's dark and colder, and adjusting to the loss of an hour of sleep is annoying. Heck, I did away with adjusting clocks in my house. I have two, one marked 'Standard Time' and the other 'Fake Time.' Let's get off tariffs and attempting to roll back the clock to mercantilism. Be pragmatic. Kosmas Patikoglou
Glen Oaks: Taking legitimately granted federal money back from NYC is a priority for Trump. He made a fool of himself here as a consistently failed businessman, and New Yorkers know it. Now he's after climate laws passed by our state Legislature and signed by our governor. He's out for revenge while catering to his corporate donors. He's already defunded federal efforts to develop resiliency on our extensive shorelines. Without such work, we stand to lose 80,000 homes to rising waters, many of them in Trump-voting Staten Island. The Climate Superfund Act, modeled on the law that cleaned up the toxic Love Canal upstate, is in his crosshairs. The act, signed by Gov. Hochul this year, would provide a revenue stream for resiliency projects by collecting a truly modest sum of money from the oil and gas firms that are causing climate warming and its attendant damage. She must make a stand. Kanwaldeep K. Sekhon
Manhattan: The most frightening thing about Trump is that he was fairly elected. America has freely chosen suicide. Joel Griffiths
Flushing: If you're like me and miss the morning news team from the now-shuttered WCBS 880 AM, you might enjoy reading this: Former 880 morning voice Wayne Cabot can now be heard delivering news updates for ABC News Radio, which is broadcast all over the country. Cabot has also recently been heard on 1010 WINS as well. Welcome back to one of the accomplished radio journalists in New York City history. Bob Smith
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Blizzardlike conditions descended on the Boston area on Jan. 29, and the driver, Brian Loughran, testified that before the snow grew heavy, he made multiple passes on the residential street in Canton where O'Keefe was found unresponsive. O'Keefe was discovered near a flagpole in the front yard of a now-retired Boston police sergeant, Brian Albert, shortly after 6 a.m. — a little over three hours after, Loughran said, he first passed the home in his plow, nicknamed 'Frankentruck' for what he described as its mismatch of parts. Loughran said he knew the Albert family — he used to deliver pizzas for Brian Albert's brother — and he testified that he could clearly see from his truck to Albert's front door. 'What was on the ground in the area of the flagpole?' defense attorney David Yanetti asked. 'Nothing,' Loughran responded. 'Did you see a 6-foot-1, 216-pound man lying on that lawn?' Yanetti asked. 'No,' Loughran said. 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Defense attorneys for Karen Read rested their case Wednesday, bringing her retrial for the death of her Boston police officer boyfriend one step closer to its blockbuster conclusion. Judge Beverly Cannone indicated closing arguments will begin Friday, with jurors expected to begin deliberating thereafter. Prosecutors have accused Read of hitting John O'Keefe with her SUV in January 2022 during a wintry night out drinking with friends – alleging she struck the off-duty officer while driving in reverse and left him to die outside a home in Canton, Massachusetts. Read's defense has claimed she is the victim of a cover-up, alleging other off-duty law enforcement inside that home killed O'Keefe, placed his body on the lawn and conspired to frame her. But their case during the retrial – the first ended with a hung jury – appeared more focused on sowing doubt in jurors' minds about the quality of the investigation, rather than substantiating the theory of a third-party culprit. Both sides have concentrated on the forensic evidence, with expert witnesses for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and Read's defense offering conflicting theories about what caused O'Keefe's fatal injuries. The Commonwealth presented testimony and evidence it said showed O'Keefe was hit by Read's vehicle around 12:30 a.m. on January 29, 2022, pointing to data taken from his phone and Read's SUV, as well as fragments of the vehicle's taillight found scattered across the scene. In prosecutors' telling, the collision threw O'Keefe to the cold ground, causing blunt force injuries to his head that left him incapacitated as the snowfall buried him. Prosecutors also presented evidence suggesting the couple was at odds leading up to O'Keefe's death. That included text messages indicating they were fighting on January 28. In the hours after prosecutors say O'Keefe died, Read called him dozens of times, testimony showed, leaving eight scathing voicemails. 'F**k yourself,' Read said. Read's attorneys challenged this theory: Their experts testified some of O'Keefe's injures – specifically cuts and scratches on his arm – were caused by a dog, and that the damage to Read's taillight was inconsistent with it striking a person. The defense also worked to undermine confidence in the investigation, highlighting sexist and offensive text messages the lead investigator, Michael Proctor, sent about the defendant, which ultimately led to his dishonorable discharge from the Massachusetts State Police. Proctor, however, was never called to testify. Read also chose not to take the stand. Throughout the prosecution's case, the Commonwealth played numerous clips taken from interviews Read provided news outlets and documentary film crews, using her own words to highlight inconsistencies in her account and refute the defense's arguments. 'I didn't think I hit him, hit him,' Read said in one clip taken from her October 2024 interview for NBC's 'Dateline.' 'But could I have clipped him? Could I have tagged him in the knee and incapacitated him? He didn't look mortally wounded as far as I could see,' Read said, 'but could I have done something that knocked him out and, in his drunkenness, and in the cold, (he) didn't come to again?' Asked Tuesday if she would testify, Read confirmed she would not, nodding to the many clips played in court, according to CNN affiliate WCVB. The jury, she said, has 'heard my interview clips. They've heard my voice. They've heard a lot of me.' This story has been updated with additional information.
