The most striking details come from reports written by Canton police Officers Steven A. Saraf, Stephen Mullaney, and Michael J. Lank about Jan. 29, 2022, the morning O’Keefe, a Boston police officer, died. Read said she couldn’t remember being at the address the night before, officers wrote, and she then had to be taken to a hospital in an ambulance.
Read was giving O’Keefe CPR when Saraf arrived at 34 Fairview Road for a report of a body in the snow around 6 a.m., the officer wrote. O’Keefe, skin cold the the touch because of freezing as the blizzard-like conditions from the previous night continued, was bleeding from the face, Saraf wrote, so the victim’s girlfriend had blood on her face from doing mouth-to-mouth.
“Karen kept screaming is he dead, is he dead,” the officer wrote. “She was severely distraught and was not able to tell me what happened.”
Saraf wrote that he tried to console her, and sent her to sit in a car, out of the bad weather.
Lank, a sergeant, wrote that that Read was “hysterical.” The only statement she was able to make to officers on scene, he wrote, “was that she did not remember ever being at 34 Fairview Rd” the night before.
Lank and Mullaney both wrote that Read talked to her parents about killing herself. The police filed paperwork to commit her to a hospital, they wrote, and EMS took her to Good Samaritan Medical Center in Brockton.
In the following days, Read, of Mansfield, was criminally charged in connection with O’Keefe’s death. She was later indicted on charges including second-degree murder. Read, now 44, is accused of intentionally backing her SUV into O’Keefe after dropping him off at a party at the Fairview Road home after a night of bar hopping, according to prosecutors.
The Norfolk district attorney’s office says she left him to die in the snow outside that home, which is owned by a fellow Boston police officer O’Keefe knew. Prosecutors have said their relationship was rocky amid allegations of cheating.
O’Keefe died of blunt-impact injuries to his head and hypothermia, according to his death certificate.
Read’s lawyers and supporters have argued that she did not kill O’Keefe, but rather is being framed as part of a massive conspiracy that includes multiple law-enforcement agencies. Read’s attorneys claim O’Keefe was beaten by the people at the party — and possibly bitten by the residents’ dog — and left for dead outside.
The case has become the center of a media frenzy, with local news blogger Aidan Kearney, also known as Turtleboy, writing hundreds of articles about the case and championing Read’s presumed innocence. Norfolk Superior Court staff are girding for a trial that’s expected to last more than a month — one that will be covered by local and national media and attended by a crowd of adamant supporters of Read.
The case also has prompted an unusual federal probe into the investigation.
The new information comes from documents relating to a defense motion to dismiss the charges on the grounds that the prosecution misled the grand jury leading up to Read’s indictment. The judge ruled against the defense in a filing that was already public, sending the case toward trial.
Many of the defense’s arguments in the motion centered on claims that officers — including Lank — had conflicts of interest because they already knew the people inside the home.
“To be clear, not a single witness testified that they observed Ms. Read strike O’Keefe with her vehicle, injure him in any way, or otherwise drive erratically on the night in question,” Read’s attorneys wrote. “The Commonwealth’s presentation of the case was predicated entirely on flimsy speculation and presumption, underpinned by a questionable and biased investigation, and highly dubious ‘physical evidence.’ ”
The motion says 41 people testified to the grand jury, including people who were in the house and the medical examiner.
The prosecution argued, in a…
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