Karen Read's Defense Underway in Massachusetts Retrial Riveting the Nation
Karen Read's Defense Underway in Massachusetts Retrial Riveting the Nation originally appeared on L.A. Mag.
Before presenting his first witness, Los Angeles defense attorney Alan Jackson argued to the judge overseeing his client Karen Read's retrial that the case should be thrown out of court because "there was no collision." Read, 45, a former adjunct professor at a Massachusetts university, has been on trial for six weeks in connection with the death of her boyfriend, Boston Police Officer John O'Keefe, whose body was found in a snowbank on Jan. 29, 2022. Prosecutors say she backed into him during a blinding blizzard after a night of drinking, but her defense team insists O'Keefe died during an altercation with fellow law enforcement officers who were inside the house at 34 Fairview Road in Canton, the address where O'Keefe's remains were recovered. Read has pleaded not guilty to charges of second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating under the influence, and leaving the scene of a crash resulting in death.
'The Commonwealth has simply not proven, even in a light most favorable to them, that there was a collision on January 29th, 2022, at 34 Fairview Road in Canton, Massachusetts,' Jackson argued in his required finding for not guilty motion.'There was no collision proven to have occurred. There was no eyewitness presented. There was no video evidence, no audio evidence, and no evidence in the form of physical evidence at the scene by searches that were done by officers on the morning of January 29, 2022,' Jackson argued. 'The Commonwealth, through suspect experts based on circumstantial technical data, only sought to prove a backing event. And that's important. They sought to prove that at 34 Fairview, the SUV went backward. They did not prove. And every single one of their experts was asked this question. They did not prove that there was actually a collision associated with that backing event."The judge denied Jackson's motion, and the defense called its first witness to mark the 24th day of testimony in the controversial case, Matthew DiSogra, an engineer who specializes in accident analysis. He began his testimony by casting doubt on the timeline laid out by one of the prosecution's key witnesses, forensic scientist Shanon Burgess, who had to admit from the witness stand that his resume misstated his credentials.
This story was originally reported by L.A. Mag on May 30, 2025, where it first appeared.
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