The murder trial of Karen Read entered its second day in Massachusetts Tuesday with two witnesses whose testimony appeared at odds with aspects of the prosecution’s narrative.
Read, 44, faces second-degree murder charges for allegedly reversing her car into boyfriend, Boston police officer John O’Keefe, then leaving him for dead in the early hours of Jan. 29, 2022.
Financial analyst and college professor Read says she returned to the scene later that morning with two other women and found his body, at which point she became hysterical.
Prosecutors have claimed Read made guilty admissions at the scene as police and first responders arrived, but that wasn’t borne out by witnesses heard Tuesday.
Responding police officer Steve Saraf admitted he didn’t originally attribute the words “this is all my fault. I did this,” to Read until months after the death of O’Keefe, when he was a witness for the grand jury that indicted her.
When pressed by the defense during the trial, Saraf admitted it “was an oversight” that he didn’t include those words in his original report.
Canton Police Officer Stephen Mullaney also testified he never heard Read say “I did it,” or “I hit him. I hit him. I hit him.” at the death scene that morning.
O’Keefe’s body was found lying in the snow outside a house in the Boston suburb of Canton. Read had dropped him off for a house party with other police officer pals after a night when they had both been drinking.
Prosecutors say Read and O’Keefe, 46, engaged in a drunken argument in her car while she was dropping him off then she intentionally backed her Lexus SUV into O’Keefe in a fit of rage then left him to die in the snow.
Read has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating under the influence and leaving the scene of a crime.
She denies killing O’Keefe and claims she’s being framed by a powerful conspiracy which runs through various branches of Massachusetts law enforcement. Her defense claims O’Keefe was killed by someone else at the house party and then evidence has been fumbled or doctored to make her look guilty.
Since Read has been charged it has emerged there is a parallel federal probe of a possible police cover-up related to the handling of O’Keefe’s death.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” a source close to the case previously told The Post about the federal probe.
“It’s pretty crazy and yet the Norfolk District Attorney is going ahead with the trial and no one’s stopping it. To me the [prosecutors] are on a suicide mission.”
According to Read, she dropped of O’Keefe that night around 12:30 a.m. at his friend Jennifer McCabe’s house, who she didn’t know well, where about a dozen people were partying. She then drove the three miles to his home in Canton and went to bed.
Read says she awoke around 4:30 a.m. worried her boyfriend had not come home. She tried calling him, then McCabe as well as an old friend of O’Keefe’s, Kerry Roberts.
Read said she went to McCabe house in hysterics and the two women, along with Roberts, drove back to O’Keefe’s home and then to Albert’s looking for him.
When they eventually arrived at the Albert home it was still dark outside but Karen saw O’Keefe’s body on the lawn and rushed to administer CPR.
Read has disputed saying she hit O’Keefe with her car, telling ABC News last August: “I said, ‘I hit him’? It was preceded by a ‘Did,’ and proceded by a question mark.
“I did not kill John O’Keefe. I have never harmed a hair on John O’Keefe’s head,” Read told ABC.
Read’s Lawyer Alan Jackson asked about the statement during the trial Tuesday while questioning Canton Firefighter Timothy Nuttall, asking him if his client said said “could I have hit him?” at the crime scene.
”I heard ‘I hit him, I hit him,” Nuttall said.
Nuttall testified he asked Read “do you know him,” about O’Keefe and she responded by saying “I hit him, I hit him.”
The trial continues Thursday.
