USC Medical School Professor Testifies Karen Read Boyfriend 'Attacked' By Dog Before Death
USC Medical School Professor Testifies Karen Read Boyfriend 'Attacked' By Dog Before Death originally appeared on L.A. Mag.
Week seven in the blockbuster retrial of Karen Read got off to a raucous start as a former Canton Police Officer Kelly Dever testified that she felt pressured by the defense team to testify to statements she gave to the FBI in 2023 that she has now recanted. "Did you tell those law enforcement agents on August 9th, 2023, that you saw Brian Higgins and Chief Berkowitz go into the sallyport together and alone with the SUV for a 'wildly long time'?" Jackson asked her."That was my recollection at the time," she replied. She has since said that she was mistaken when she told federal investigators eighteen months ago that she saw the men - the former Chief of the Canton Police Department and federal Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms Agent Brian Higgins, who was on a task force that turned out of that station - near Read's car after it had been towed as part of the evidence in the case. Read's boyfriend, John O'Keefe, a Boston Police Officer, was found dead during a blizzard on Jan. 29, 2022, and the government says she backed into him after a night of heavy drinking and left him to die in a snowbank. Read's defense, which includes high-profile Los Angeles defense attorney Alan Jackson and his partner Elizabeth Little, maintains O'Keefe was attacked by fellow cops and a German Shepherd inside the home at 34 Fairview Road in Canton and dragged out to the yard where he died. Higgins, who had been flirting with Read in the weeks before O'Keefe died and had shared a kiss with her, according to testimony, had been among the revelers inside the house.
Dever, who is now a Boston Police Officer, told the court that Jackson threatened to charge her with perjury for recanting her prior statements to federal investigators in August 2023. The FBI was investigating the Read case at the time and multiple police officials connected to her case also responded to the death of Sandra Birchmore in the same town nearly a year to the day before O'Keefe died. The Norfolk County District Attorney's Office and its state police investigators said Birchmore took her own life, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The FBI took over the case, which led to the startling arrest of a former Stoughton Police Detective Matthew Farwell, a former police union official whose own cases were prosecuted by in that same D.A.'s office. Farwell is now charged by the FBI with strangling Birchmore to death and staging her death to look like a suicide to cover up the fact that she was pregnant with his child and that he had allegedly taken her virginity when she was a 15-year-old girl in the Stoughton Police Explorer's Program, a mentoring activity for kids interested in careers in law enforcement. Several of the investigators in the Read case were also part of the Birchmore investigation, and did not consider Farwell a suspect in her death. Mention of the Birchmore case, and the FBI's questioning of witnesses in the Read case, will not be allowed per a ruling from Norfolk Superior Court Judge Beverly Cannone, as reported by Los Angeles. Farwell's scheduled first status hearing in the Birchmore case has been pushed multiple times during Read's retrial, and is expected to take place over Zoom on July 1.
Officer Dever was questioned during the period the FBI was on Boston's South Shore for both cases in the clandestine federal probe. She presented herself on the stand Monday morning as a hostile witness forced to appear by Read's defense team. Jackson asked her if she wanted to testify. 'I am put on the stand in a murder trial,' Dever replied in an icy tone. 'I don't know why I'm here. I have no connection to this case.' Dever testified that she never spoke to anyone in the Norfolk County District Attorney's Office about her involvement in Read's case, though she confirmed she had a personal friendship with prosecution witness, Sarah Levinson, who was a guest at the party inside 34 Fairview Road, the home owned by another Boston cop Brian Albert who had invited people to his house after bar-hopping with Read and O'Keefe in Canton. Dever testified she was working as a Canton Police dispatcher when Read's Lexus SUV - the weapon prosecutors say was used to plow into O'Keefe - was towed into a sallyport at the department's garage on the afternoon of Jan. 29, 2022. Jackson asked whether she could recall observing 'anything unusual' that stood out to her in the station's garage while working dispatch.'I can't make that statement on the stand, because I've been provided information released by the defense,' Dever answered, adding that what she said to the FBI she now believes, was a distorted memory." "Therefore I can't state it, because at this point it would be a lie," she told the court in the tense exchange with Jackson. "I cannot make that statement that you're wanting me to make on the stand, because I've advised that that would be a lie.'
Jackson redirected Dever to answer the question truthfully. Dever testified that she was cooperative with the FBI, and retracted her statement when presented with information that showed she was off duty when Read's SUV arrived. 'I am telling you," she testified, "I did not see anything.'Jackson pushed back, asking Dever whether she told the agents she saw Higgins and Berkowitz enter the sallyport together 'for a wildly long time' which was the statement she gave to the FBI while Read's SUV was in the garage. Dever confirmed that was her initial recollection, but had recanted it. Under cross examination by special prosecutor Hank Brennan, Dever testified that she felt threatened by defense attorneys who wanted her to say she saw Higgins and Berkowitz in the sallyport with Read's SUV. 'They became very aggressive, raised their voices, and the one word that I can very definitely remember is they said that they would charge me with perjury,' Dever alleged. "My entire job revolves around what I say on the stand. If I was to lie, I lose my job. I lose everything. I'm here to tell the truth. I cannot lie while sitting on this stand.'Another government witness who took the stand in Read's retrial, and during the first trial, which ended in a hung jury last year, admitted in her testimony that she had also lied about her identity when the FBI showed up to interview her in 2023. She also initially failed to tell the FBI that she called Albert, Peggy O'Keefe, the slain officer's mother, her friend Kerry Roberts, who was also with McCabe and Read when O'Keefe was found, a witness advocate in the Norfolk County District Attorney's office - who is trying the case - and her husband in the span of ten minutes after the agents showed up at her home.State witness Kerry Roberts also admitted to making statements to a grand jury that contradicted her testimony in Read's retrial.
Dever was the second defense witness to take the stand Monday. Text messages from the now-fired Massachusetts State Police Trooper Michael Proctor were read by a longtime friend, Jonathan Diamandis, who had been one of the recipients in a text chain of some of the misogynistic messages the investigator directed at Read during his investigation. The friend was asked to read a series of texts Proctor sent to the group in the hours and days after O'Keefe's death, but denied the request because he was 'uncomfortable' with doing so.Brennan read them and asked Diamandis to verify the accuracy of each message, which included terms like "whack job cunt" and "nut bag, as my chief would say," which the defense argues, showed the bias shown against Read almost immediately after her arrest. That bias, Read's defense argues, was part of a vast police coverup to protect the homeowner, other cops, and the Albert family's German Shepherd, Chloe. The defense called University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine faculty member Dr. Marie Russell to the stand to testify about what she called evidence of a dog attack that occurred before O'Keefe died. Wounds on his right arm, she told the court, 'were inflicted as the result of a dog attack." The judge struck the word "attack" from the record. Russell later added that the deep cuts were "multiple strikes from a dog," and that O'Keefe's injuries came as "the result of dog bites or claw marks.' Russell, a former County-USC Medical Center trauma doctor in its emergency room, was also a one-time police officer in Malden, Massachusetts, before entering her career in medicine. Chloe was re-homed to a farm in Vermont sometime after O'Keefe's death. The state ended its case against Read playing a clip of an interview the defendant gave, where she wondered out loud if she had "hit" O'Keefe after dropping him off at an after-party.
This story was originally reported by L.A. Mag on Jun 2, 2025, where it first appeared.
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