A woman accused of leaving her Boston police officer boyfriend dead in a snowbank after a night of drinking was still legally intoxicated or close to it about eight hours later, a former state police toxicologist testified Tuesday.
Prosecutors say Karen Read dropped John O’Keefe off at a house party thrown by a fellow officer in January 2022, hit him with her SUV and then drove away. Read has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder, and his defense team argues that the owner’s relationship with local and state police tainted the investigation. They also say she was framed and that O’Keefe was beaten inside the home and left outside.
As the highly publicized trial entered its fifth week, jurors heard from Nicholas Roberts, who analyzed blood test results from the hospital where Read was evaluated after O’Keefe’s body was discovered. He calculated that her blood alcohol content at 9 a.m., the time of the blood test, was between 0.078% and 0.083%, close to the legal limit for intoxication in Massachusetts. Based on a police report that suggested her last drink was at 12:45 p.m., her maximum blood alcohol level would have been between 0.135% and 0.292%, he said.
Several witnesses described Read frantically asking, “Did I hit him?” before O’Keefe was found or saying afterward, “I hit him.” Others said the couple had a stormy relationship and O’Keefe was trying to end it.
O’Keefe was raising his niece and nephew, and they told jurors Tuesday that they heard frequent arguments between him and Read. O’Keefe’s niece described the relationship as “good at the beginning but bad at the end,” according to Fox25 News, although the nephew said they were never physically violent.
The defense, which was allowed to present what is called third-party evidence of guilt, argues that investigators focused on Read because she was a “convenient outsider” who saved them from having to consider other suspects. Those involved include Brian Albert, who owned the Canton home where O’Keefe died, and Brian Higgins, a federal agent who was there that night.
Higgins, a special agent with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, testified last week about exchanging flirtatious messages with Read in the weeks before O’Keefe’s death. On Tuesday, he acknowledged extracting just those messages before throwing away his phone during the murder investigation.
Higgins said he changed his phone number because someone he was investigating for his job got his number. He got a new phone and number on September 29, 2022, the day before he was ordered to preserve his phone, and threw his old one away a few months later. Questioning Higgins on the stand, Read’s lawyer suggested the timing was suspicious.
“Did you know when you threw that phone and the destroyed SIM card in the trash that from that day forward no one would be able to access the contents of what you and Brian Albert discussed via text messages on your old phone,” said the attorney David Yannetti.
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