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4 days ago
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Karen Read claims police bungled the investigation. What did they supposedly do wrong?
Blood samples gathered in red Solo cups and kept in a brown paper grocery bag. Reports about the case that took over a year and a half to be written. Critical evidence that was logged a month after police collected it. Defense lawyers at the trial of Karen Read – a Massachusetts woman accused of hitting her cop boyfriend with her SUV and leaving him for dead – are aggressively going after evidence being used against the 45-year-old woman. The goal is to raise doubts in the case over the death of Boston Police Officer John O'Keefe, 46. The move to question evidence is the latest tactic defense attorneys are using to distance Read from O'Keefe's death outside a Canton, Massachusetts home in January 2022. Evidentiary attacks, such as those made famous during the O.J. Simpson trial, typically target police who defense attorneys argue did not follow best practices. 'You can't convict someone based on a sloppy investigation and this could be enough to create a reasonable doubt,' said Kate Mangels, a Southern California criminal defense attorney who is not involved in the case. 'These are more technical arguments but they really do matter when the prosecution is asking jurors to rely on these pieces of evidence.' Prosecutors say the former finance professor hit her boyfriend of about two years with her black Lexus in a drunken rage and left him in the snow. Read's lawyers say the police investigation was marred by bias and incompetence. Read's lawyers used the same tactic at trial in 2024, according to experts. She is back in court after the trial ended with a hung jury. Among evidence supporting prosecutors' theory against Read are shards of a taillight discovered where O'Keefe was found and the damaged state Read's vehicle was in after O'Keefe's death. Defense lawyers say police bungled the investigation. Issues, according to the defense, include everything from how long investigators took to write reports about the case – as many as 581 days – to the unorthodox ways police went about collecting evidence. 'It's hard to say these anomalies are instances of a police cover-up but I do think it's enough to say there's concerns here with the integrity of the evidence,' Mangels said. 'It definitely isn't best practices. That said, in the reality of a crime scene, it happens sometimes that things are collected in a way that seems odd.' In the fraught hours after O'Keefe's body was discovered outside the suburban house of a fellow Boston cop, Lieutenant Paul Gallagher of the Canton Police Department was among the first responders on the scene collecting evidence. Gallagher – now retired – drove to the scene in his own four-wheel drive vehicle, testifying that his police cruiser would not have been able to make it through the snow that left O'Keefe buried. Among the officer's first moves to collect evidence was to use a leaf blower to clear away the four inches of snow covering the blood-stained spot where O'Keefe was found and then collect samples of 'coagulated blood' in red Solo cups. 'I wasn't going to get a second chance at it,' Gallagher explained on the stand. 'It was either collect it or never have it.' Gallagher never wrote a report about his evidence collection and did not create a diagram of where evidence was found, he testified in court. David Ring, a California-based trial attorney following Read's trial, said he expected defense attorneys to attack evidence again because it's a common tactic and because it's exactly what they did at Read's first trial in 2024. 'It's a common tactic because it's the easy tactic,' Ring told USA TODAY. 'In the first trial this tactic was definitely successful for the defense. The lengthy delays, failure to interview witnesses, the red Solo cups— all that clearly added up to a hung jury.' The question jurors should pay attention to, according to Ring, is whether the issues raised even matter. He called issues like collecting of blood samples in improvised containers a 'shoulder shrug' because they likely belonged to the victim. 'The defense wants them to focus on red Solo cups because that's inflammatory," Ring said. "But the jury hopefully is looking at the totality of the evidence." Patrick McLaughlin, an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said police need to improve how they approach crime scenes to leave defense attorneys fewer issues to raise. 'It's a game to try to catch the person napping or not having done the report the right way,' said the retired New York City Police Department crime scene technician. The 20-year NYPD veteran who faced tough cross-examinations over his investigations said investigators should aim to arrive at the scene as soon as possible, take their time collecting evidence and write reports without delay. 'The best thing in the world,' McLaughlin said, 'is to hand the defense attorney 2,000 pages of documents and say, 'Here you find the flaw.'' Massachusetts state police eventually took over the case from Canton police and Read's lawyers also grilled them over their handling of the investigation. Read's lawyers also questioned them about steps, including taking over a month to book evidence from the crime scene and waiting over a year to interview key witnesses. Massachusetts State Police Sergeant Yuri Bukhenik vigorously defended his agency's handling of the investigation. 'You claiming that it wasn't booked into something doesn't mean it wasn't properly handled in custody and under our control,' Bukhenik said in response to sharp questions from Read's lawyers about why it took so long for police to book pieces of tail light found at the scene. Among witnesses police waited over a year to interview was Heather Maxon— a significant witness for prosecutors who testified that on the night before O'Keefe died she saw what appeared to be Read and O'Keefe in a black SUV outside the house where the officer was ultimately found. Read's lawyers questioning of evidence against the former finance professor comes amid strong arguments from the prosecution— including a bombshell admission she allegedly made to first responders and her own admission of her heavy drinking. But experts say missteps from police investigating the case could work in Read's favor. 'This is why people don't trust the cops sometimes,' said Sydney Rushing, a criminal defense attorney out of Michigan who has been providing analysis of Read's case on Tik Tok. 'How is the jury supposed to look at this report and think they're accurate when they take 581 days to write.' Contributing: Karissa Waddick This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Why does Karen Read say police bungled the murder investigation?
Yahoo
6 days ago
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Plow driver testifies he saw no body in snow during crucial hours in Karen Read murder trial
Karen Read's defense team is looking to build on momentum yesterday from a surprise police witness who testified that her taillight was less damaged when he helped seize it with a warrant than it appears in photos taken after it arrived at the Canton Police Department, where authorities first towed it. Read's defense called Brian "Lucky" Loughran, a Department of Public Works employee, to the witness stand Wednesday morning. He testified that he passed by 34 Fairview Road, the home of Brian Albert, where John O'Keefe was found dead in the snow, multiple times between 2:40 a.m. and around 6 a.m. Prosecutors allege Read hit her boyfriend outside and drove off, leaving him to die amid blizzard conditions. Loughran said he had good visibility despite the blizzard conditions due to multiple lights on the plow truck and a high seat. Asked if he saw a body in the snow, he said no -- but he added that he did see a Ford Edge SUV parked outside the address on a later pass around 3:30 a.m. Karen Read's Silence In Murder Trial Raises Stakes For Defense He said it stood out to him because he was from the area and knew the Albert family -- and he had to maneuver around the vehicle as he cleared the road. Read On The Fox News App "For as long as I can remember, they have never parked a vehicle in front of their house," Loughran testified. "They've always had enough ample parking in the driveway." Special prosecutor Hank Brennan asked Loughran during cross-examination about purported threats from an online blogger and inconsistencies in his timeline. Karen Read Judge Blocks Sandra Birchmore Mentions; Expert Says Cases Should Be Wake-up Call For Police Loughran said he never felt threatened by the blogger and denied having a bad memory when Brennan confronted him with multiple statements that offered different times for when the river passed by Fairview Road. Then Brennan played police dashcam video taken outside 34 Fairview that showed the heavy snowfall and the distance between the house there and Cedarcrest Road, where a plow truck drove by multiple times in the background. Loughran agreed that some of the passes were him in the plow, dubbed "Frankentruck," but said he couldn't be sure at other moments. Follow The Fox True Crime Team On X The taillight fragments were not found at the crime scene until later, too, and her defense's implication is that they could have been planted there. Wednesday marks the 27th day of Read's retrial on murder and other charges in the January 2022 death of O'Keefe, her then-boyfriend, a Boston police officer, and an uncle who had taken in the orphaned children of his late sister and brother-in-law. She denies hitting him with her 2021 Lexus SUV and leaving the scene, where he died with head trauma and signs of hypothermia. The defense says no collision happened and something or someone else caused his injuries. On Tuesday, Dighton Police Sgt. Nicholas Barros testified that when he arrived at Read's parents' house to help state police confiscate the vehicle, fewer pieces of taillight were missing from the cracked taillight. He said that a photo of Read's SUV taken at the Canton Police Department's sallyport – a secure garage – did "absolutely not" show the taillight in the same condition it was in when he saw it in the driveway. Barros surprised the courtroom when he testified for the commonwealth during Read's first trial, which ended with a deadlocked jury last year. This time, he was a defense witness. Karen Read's Suv Reached '74% Throttle' Moments Before John O'keefe's Final Movements, Crash Expert Testifies "He was a devastating witness who has the [district attorney's] case on life support," said Mark Bederow, a New York City-based defense attorney who is closely following the case. He said special prosecutor Hank Brennan conducted an "excellent" cross-examination, showing Barros and the jury images of Read's taillight taken over the course of the day, before police took her SUV, but defense attorney Alan Jackson performed equally well in redirect questioning. Sign Up To Get The True Crime Newsletter "The sum total is that Barros is 100% unequivocal: the taillight he saw on January 29 was not anywhere near as destroyed as when the [Massachusetts State Police] had it," he said. GET REAL-TIME UPDATES DIRECTLY ON THE True Crime Hub Grace Edwards, a Massachusetts defense attorney who is also following the case, called Barros' testimony a "bombshell" and said the surprise in trial 1 was "a clear Brady violation" – referring to a rule that prosecutors must share exculpatory evidence with the defense. "The fact that a police officer drove to the Omni Hotel to meet with the defense team of a defendant on trial for murder clearly indicates he wanted to tell his story," she told Fox News Digital. Dr. Judson Welcher, an expert for the prosecution, explained to jurors how he found that O'Keefe appeared to have been struck in the arm by the back corner of Read's SUV before he fell to the ground and fractured the back of his skull. Christina Hanley, an analyst with the state police's crime lab, testified that investigators recovered plastic fragments from O'Keefe's clothing that were a match with the broken taillight or something made of the same material. Read could face life in prison if convicted of the top charge, second-degree article source: Plow driver testifies he saw no body in snow during crucial hours in Karen Read murder trial
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6 days ago
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Live court video, updates: Day 27 of testimony in Karen Read's murder retrial
Wednesday marks Day 27 of testimony in Karen Read's murder retrial, and the defense is expected to call two new witnesses to the stand. Watch Live: Testimony in Karen Read's retrial resumes at 9 a.m. Read, 45, of Mansfield, is accused of striking O'Keefe, her Boston police officer boyfriend, with her Lexus SUV and leaving him to die alone in a blizzard outside of a house party in Canton at the home of fellow officer Brian Albert on Jan. 29, 2022, following a night of drinking. Canton snowplow driver Brian 'Lucky' Loughranon and a Canton resident who was friends with O'Keefe are expected to take the stand on what's scheduled to be a half day of witness testimony. Loughran works for the town of Canton and was plowing overnight when O'Keefe was found dead. In Read's first trial, Loughran testified that his route took him by Albert's home at 34 Fairview Road and that there was no body on the lawn when he drove by. The prosecution alleges Read struck O'Keefe around 12:45 a.m. and that O'Keefe's body was on the lawn until about 6 a.m. that morning. Loughran previously said he drove by the home at 2:45 a.m. and 3:30 a.m., noticing nothing suspicious. In court on Tuesday, jurors heard from two witnesses: A dog bite expert and a Dighton police sergeant. Dr. Marie Russell, a retired emergency medicine physician, said the wounds on O'Keefe's arms were the result of a dog attack. Retrial of Karen Read gets heated as ex-Canton police officer testifies, along with dog bite expert 'These multiple groupings are patterns and they are, in my opinion, by the teeth and claws of a dog,' Russell said, pointing to a photo of O'Keefe's arm. She described the wounds as linear and going in a similar direction. The prosecution had earlier sought to block Russell from testifying, questioning her credibility. Upon leaving Dedham's Norfolk Superior Court at the end of the day, Read briefly addressed reporters and said she thought Russell was 'fantastic' on the stand. Dighton Police Sgt. Nicholas Barros was at the Dighton home where William and Janet Read live when their daughter's SUV was towed to the Canton Police Department's sally port. He said Read's taillight had some damage, but not as bad as what investigators photographed in the sally port. Read attorney Alan Jackson showed Barros an image of the Lexus taillight from the Canton Police Department and asked what was different from when he saw it at Read's parents' house. Severity of damage to Karen Read's taillight comes into question during testimony of Dighton officer 'Is this the condition of the right rear taillight when you showed up at the Read household?' Jackson asked. 'Absolutely not,' Barros responded. Jackson continued, 'What's different about this photo, sir? ' Barros said, 'That taillight is completely smashed out.' Barros described seeing a hole about the size of a $1 bill before state troopers seized the Lexus SUV. He appeared confident with his memory, but also agreed with special prosecutor Hank Brennan that additional information he's read and seen has had some effect on his recollection Outside of court, Read said of Barros, 'His testimony hasn't changed. He was subpoenaed by the prosecution and said it was damaged and not completely broken a year ago, and then he said that again today.' Also on Tuesday, Read's lawyers demanded that Judge Cannone declare a mistrial after the prosecution brought up the topic of DNA while cross-examining Dr. Russell. Prosecutors allege Read intentionally backed into O'Keefe after she dropped him off at the house party and returned hours later to find him dead. The defense has claimed that she was a victim of a vast police conspiracy and that O'Keefe was fatally beaten by another law enforcement officer at the party. 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. A mistrial was declared last year after jurors said they were at an impasse and deliberating further would be futile. Get caught up with all of the latest in Karen Read's retrial. Download the FREE Boston 25 News app for breaking news alerts. Follow Boston 25 News on Facebook and Twitter. | Watch Boston 25 News NOW
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7 days ago
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Kelly Dever denies seeing key figures near Karen Read's vehicle in 'disaster' testimony: expert
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. Lead Detective's Text Messages Cast Shadow Over Karen Read Murder Trial 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." Read On The Fox News App Karen Read Sells Home And Taps Retirement Fund To Pay Mounting Legal Bills In Murder Retrial 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. Mother Of Slain Boston Police Officer Wends Wordless Message To Karen Read In Courtroom Showdown "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. Follow The Fox True Crime Team On X GET REAL-TIME UPDATES DIRECTLY ON THE True Crime Hub "[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. Karen Read Judge Blocks Sandra Birchmore Mentions; Expert Says Cases Should Be Wake-up Call For Police 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 article source: Kelly Dever denies seeing key figures near Karen Read's vehicle in 'disaster' testimony: expert
CBS News
7 days ago
- General
- CBS News
Canton police station lobby door broken after someone tries to break in
An individual who attempted to force entry into a Southeast Michigan police department lobby Monday night is now in custody and facing charges. The Canton Public Safety Department posted a picture on social media Tuesday that showed glass cracked and smashed in the lower panel of one of the entry doors, which were locked at the time of the incident. "The police department's lobby doors are typically locked during the overnight hours, with a speaker available in the vestibule for visitors to request service and/or entry during that time," the department's report explained. The police station is on South Canton Center Road. A door panel was broken at the Canton, Michigan, police station when it was locked overnight. Canton Police Department
