Kelly Dever denies seeing key figures near Karen Read's vehicle in 'disaster' testimony: expert

Fox News

2 days ago

Karen Read's defense team put a hostile witness on the stand Monday in the form of a Boston police officer who was working for the Canton Police Department the morning Karen Read and two friends discovered John O'Keefe dead under a pile of snow.
Kelly Dever, who was on duty that morning but did not play any role in the investigation, previously told the FBI that she saw two key figures in the case standing near Read's SUV in the sallyport at Canton's police headquarters for "a wildly long time." They were ATF Agent Brian Higgins — who was carrying on a flirtatious relationship with Read behind O'Keefe's back — and then-Canton Police Chief Kenneth Berkowitz.
They would have been placed next to the vehicle before other investigators found fragments that matched Read's taillight at the crime scene.
Dever testified that she retracted that statement immediately because the FBI agents showed her a timeline that indicated she left work well before Read's Lexus arrived. Then she accused Read's defense team of trying to coerce her into lying about it on the stand.
"You threatened to charge me with perjury during our phone call prior to the first trial if I didn't lie on the stand right now," she told defense attorney Alan Jackson, from the witness stand. "I'm telling you, I did not see anything. Factually, I've been provided evidence by a timeline that it is not correct."
WATCH: Karen Read challenges officer's testimony in tense murder trial
Read denied that her team pressured Dever in remarks to reporters outside the courthouse Monday afternoon.
"We subpoenaed her to testify to what she told other authorities and just wanted her to be as honest with us as she was with them," she said. "And today she's now telling us that was a lie."
She later claimed that Dever seems like "a compromised person."
Dever was visibly frustrated at times, huffing on the stand and at one point snapping at Jackson for mispronouncing her name.
"Like you can't remember my name, I don't remember," she said.
The defense is trying to show jurors that there is reasonable doubt in the investigation's findings — noting that the lead detective was fired for sending inappropriate texts and that Canton police made a series of sloppy missteps early in the investigation, before state police arrived.
Their position is that her SUV never struck O'Keefe, and something or someone else caused his fatal injuries. In her first trial, they also alleged that police framed Read.
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"[Dever] illustrated perfectly the defense theory — that sketchy cops are lying to help the prosecution," said Mark Bederow, a New York City-based criminal defense lawyer who is following the case.
He called her testimony "a disaster" and questioned whether she had been pressured by colleagues in law enforcement into recanting her story, rather than the defense.
"It was a risky move to call her, but her demeanor was so awful that combined with what she admitted telling the feds, it likely helped the defense," Bederow told Fox News Digital.
Retired Massachusetts Superior Court Judge and Boston College professor Jack Lu called Dever "a profile in courage" and that putting her on the stand suggests desperation from the defense.
"She's out of central casting, says that she has confirmed her prior memory is factually, irrefutably wrong," he told Fox News Digital. "If they say she has damaged her future ability to testify that is laughable."
She's also facing blowback. Lu pointed to a Facebook group called Free Karen Read with more than 40,000 members, where a user urged others to call the police commissioner's office if they "believe Kelly Dever should be given the axe."
Dever could not immediately be reached for comment.
It's up to the jurors to decide whether she was truthful on the stand or when she first made her statements to the FBI.