Karen Read prosecution rests case with video of her wondering whether she killed her boyfriend: ‘What if I clipped him?'
Prosecutors rested their case in Karen Read's new murder trial after more than a month of testimony — and closed with a video of Read expressing fears that she may have struck and killed her boyfriend John O'Keefe with her car.
'What if I ran his foot over or what if I clipped him in the knee, and he passed out or went to care for himself and he threw up or passed out?' Read said in an interview clip played for Massachusetts jurors Thursday.
'I thought, could I have run him over? Did he try to get me as I was leaving, and I didn't know it?' she said in the clip, which came from an April 2024 documentary released ahead of her first trial, according to WCVB.
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3 Karen Read called the prosecution's case against her 'unjust' after the case was rested on Thursday.
Greg Derr/The Patriot Ledger / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
'I always have the music blasting. It's snowing. I had the wipers going, the heater blasting. Did he come and hit the back of my car, and I hit him in the knee, and he was drunk and passed out and [he] asphyxiated or something,' Read said in the video.
Once the clip ended — with Read explaining that her lawyer, David Yannetti, said she would have 'some element of culpability' if all that had happened — the video dramatically faded to black, and jurors were left in silence as prosecutors closed.
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Read, 45, is accused of deliberately backing her Lexus SUV into 46-year-old O'Keefe, a Boston police officer, before he died on a night of drunken arguing in January 2022.
O'Keefe's body was found bloodied and battered in the snow outside a friend's house in Canton the morning after Read drove him there to party with some of his cop bodies during a blizzard.
The couple reportedly had a rocky relationship before the fateful night.
3 Read and her boyfriend John O'Keefe, who prosecutors say she deliberately ran down with her car.
Courtesy of David Yannetti
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Earlier in the week prosecutors called accident reconstructionist Judson Welcher to the stand, who testified that data from Read's Lexus indicated she had driven forward then stopped and accelerated in reverse at 74% throttle — about 23 mph — at the time that she was dropping O'Keefe off at the house.
And on Thursday, prosecutors pressed Welcher on whether or not the data could suffer from 'confirmation bias' — which Welcher denied, saying the car presented them with 'objective information.'
With the prosecution's case finished, the defense will begin calling witnesses Friday, and is expected to kick things off with their own accident reconstructionist, according to Boston.com.
Read told reporters it remains 'TBD' whether she will take the stand herself, which she did not during her first trial last year.
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3 Prosecutor Hank Brennan revisited testimony that data from Read's car suggested she reversed into O'Keefe.
AP
The defense will likely take about two weeks to present its case, Read added, before calling the prosecution's case against her 'unjust.'
Read's first case ended in a mistrial last summer after jurors were unable to reach an agreement on her charges of second-degree murder and manslaughter.
She pleaded not guilty, with her defense arguing O'Keefe was beaten by his cop friends and dumped in the snow where he was found — and that the pals then tried to frame Read.
The last trial dredged up responding officers' questionable investigation tactics — which included using leaf-blowers to melt snow and storing O'Keefe's frozen blood in Solo cups, along with vulgar texts officers exchanged about Read — to support their claims.
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