Latest news with #DrAizikWolf
Fox News
2 days ago
- Fox News
Karen Read trial nears its finale: What each side is banking on
With closing arguments scheduled for Friday morning, jurors will soon begin deliberating Karen Read's fate after 31 days of testimony in her second trial over the death of Boston cop John O'Keefe, her former boyfriend. Read, 45, is accused of clipping the 46-year-old outside a house party and leaving him to die on the ground during a blizzard on Jan. 29, 2022. Her defense denies that a collision ever happened, suggesting he was attacked by someone at the party and a dog instead. Judge Beverly Cannone denied the defense's second motion for a finding of not guilty Thursday – clearing the way for deliberations to begin. The following includes core evidence presented by both the prosecution and the defense. Former Whitey Bulger defense lawyer turned special prosecutor Hank Brennan, derided as a "mob lawyer" by Read's vocal supporters, came in to take over the case after last year's mistrial. Assistant Norfolk County District Attorneys Adam Lally and Laura McLaughlin returned from the first trial. Central to Brennan's case is that O'Keefe had plastic fragments that matched Read's taillight embedded in his clothes. Dr. Aizik Wolf, a renowned brain surgeon, said O'Keefe's injury is consistent with a "classic" fall backward on frozen ground. And a biomechanist named Dr. Judson Welcher testified that Read likely hit him with a glancing blow to the right arm and sent him stumbling backward before he cracked his head on the lawn at 34 Fairview Road in Canton, where he was found under a pile of snow hours later. And in Read's own alleged words, she repeatedly said, "I hit him. I hit him. I hit him." The timing of Jennifer McCabe's Google search – "hos long to die in cold" – is another key factor, according to Paul Mauro, a retired NYPD inspector who is following the case. "If at 6:23 a.m., it corroborates Jen McCabe's testimony," he told Fox News Digital. "If you believe Jen McCabe, you pretty much have to convict. You could perhaps acquit on the top charge, but certainly you would have to convict on the manslaughter." Read's legal team includes big-city lawyers from three states – Boston's David Yannetti, New York City's Robert Alessi, and Alan Jackson and Elizabeth Little from Los Angeles. In her first trial, Yannetti and Jackson argued that Read had been "framed" by local and state police. This time around, they focused on the theory that Read's 2021 Lexus LX 570 SUV never struck O'Keefe. They also deployed a "Bowden defense" – attempting to show the police investigation was "inadequate." Investigators collected evidence in red Solo cups and shopping bags, used a leaf blower to move snow, mislabeled evidence and did not seek a search warrant for the house at the address where they recovered O'Keefe's remains. Former Massachusetts State Trooper Michael Proctor, a homicide detective on the case, later lost his job for sharing confidential and law enforcement sensitive information on an R-rated text chain that also included lewd remarks about the defendant. GET REAL-TIME UPDATES DIRECTLY ON THE TRUE CRIME HUB Defense experts testified that the minor abrasions on O'Keefe's right arm were not caused by contact with Read's broken taillight, but rather by dog or animal bites. Dr. Daniel Wolfe and Dr. Andrew Rentschler disputed Welcher's findings with testing of their own, using a crash dummy arm that they said could not reproduce the same damage to a Lexus taillight. The blow to the back of his head – which fractured his skull – did not come from contact on the frozen lawn, but rather by contact with a ridged, grainy surface, according to Dr. Elizabeth Laposata, a forensic pathologist and clinical professor at Brown University. Laposata also disputed autopsy findings that indicated O'Keefe had hypothermia – testifying that his internal injuries came from resuscitation attempts and not damage from the cold. "The defense case is science, science and then more science," said Mark Bederow, a New York City attorney representing Read ally and Canton blogger Aidan Kearney. "No car accident, then no crime." Read faces 15 years to life in prison if convicted on the top charge. If convicted of drunken driving manslaughter, she would face 5 to 20.
Fox News
4 days ago
- Fox News
John O'Keefe did not die where prosecutors claim in Karen Read trial, doctor testifies
John O'Keefe did not hit the back of his head and suffer fatal injuries on the lawn where Karen Read found him the morning after prosecutors allege she clipped him with her Lexus SUV and left him to die in a blizzard, according to a defense expert. "If you fall back on a flat surface, you get, many times the tear you get in the scalp can be more like a star because you just hit one part, and then the tears go and kind of a star pattern," testified Dr. Elizabeth Laposata, pointing to an evidence photo not shown on the courthouse video stream. "And also, because you would not have those vertical, discrete vertical scraping of the skin, you, you would tend to if you fell back on grass, you would tend to see, you might see grass in the wound, or you would tend to see an irregular kind of crisscross pattern of the flattened grass. And that's not what we have here on Mr. O'Keefe." She said he must've hit his head on an uneven surface. "But that ridge also, it wasn't smooth," she testified. "It had some little grainy, grainy things sticking up on it." While she agreed that blunt force trauma to the head killed O'Keefe, she also said she did not see signs of hypothermia, contradicting the second cause of death in his official autopsy. Laposata's testimony contradicts the testimony of Dr. Aizik Wolf, a brain surgeon who took the stand for the prosecution earlier in the trial. "The only way he could get this kind of an injury was to fall backwards, hit the back of his head, and then the resulting energy forces going into his brain, into the base of his skull," said Wolf, who testified that he'd seen numerous injuries, often fatal, from backward falls in icy Minnesota weather early in his career. "This is what happens when soft tissue hits a solid ground," he testified. Read's defense scored a minor victory before jurors arrived in court Tuesday for the 30th day of her murder trial in the death of O'Keefe, her former boyfriend and a Boston police officer. Attorney Alan Jackson asked Judge Beverly Cannone to reconsider and order yesterday blocking defense witness Laposata from testifying about dog bites. After a contentious back and forth with Brennan, which saw the two talking over one another and raising their voices, Cannone denied the request but also offered a compromise. "In her experience, Mr. Jackson, you have to lay a foundation in her experience saying animal bites," Cannone said. "This is consistent with what she has seen in an animal bite." GET REAL-TIME UPDATES DIRECTLY ON THE TRUE CRIME HUB Laposata is a forensic pathologist and professor at Brown University's medical school, whom Jackson described as "absolutely peerless," although she resigned from her prior role as Rhode Island's chief medical examiner amid an audit that found her office let hundreds of incomplete autopsies languish under her watch, according to local reports from the time. She returned to the stand once jurors arrived, and she explained the internal injuries to O'Keefe's brain and said pressure on the brain stem from internal swelling and bleeding as a result of the fracture is what killed him. The cut over his right eye, however, was caused by a different impact. She said it did not appear to have been inflicted by the spoiler on the back of Read's SUV.
