Karen Read reflects on her trial, details what she says happened the night Boston police officer John O’Keefe was found dead
Karen Read was on trial this summer, accused of hitting her boyfriend, beloved Boston police officer John O’Keefe, with her vehicle and leaving him to die in January 2022.
The two-month trial, which ended in July and divided the town of Canton, Massachusetts, while making national headlines, resulted in a mistrial after jurors were deadlocked.
Amongst the frenzy, “20/20” caught up with Karen Read in her hotel room, where she prepared for the weekslong trial ahead and shared for the first time the impact her case has had on her life.
“This is no life. I'm not in prison, but this is no life. I'm stressed every day. I'm waiting for the next shoe to drop,” Read, who has maintained her innocence, told ABC News. “It just feels like a kind of purgatory.”
This rare access and other wide-ranging interviews with Karen Read are part of an all-new “20/20” episode, airing Sept. 6 on ABC and streaming the next day on Hulu. The episode also features never-before-seen footage with Read as she prepared for trial with her defense team, and personal interviews with John O’Keefe’s family and close friends.
A heavy blizzard was expected to hit Boston late in the evening of Jan. 28, 2022. Before the storm arrived, Read and O’Keefe met friends for drinks at a local sports bar. They then went together to another nearby bar.
Around midnight, O’Keefe and some of the others at the bar elected to leave after an invitation to continue socializing at the home of Brian Albert, a fellow Boston police officer who was among the people in attendance.
Read said she felt fatigued, so she claims she dropped O’Keefe off outside Albert’s residence on Fairview Road. Read said she then drove in her black SUV to O’Keefe’s house and fell asleep.
However, Albert, and the other attendants of the gathering, say that O’Keefe never came inside the home.
Hours later, Read said she awoke alone in the home, so she anxiously called O’Keefe’s friends. One of her first calls was to Jennifer McCabe, the sister-in-law of Brian Albert, who was part of the group from the night before.
McCabe says that Read called her, screaming frantically that O’Keefe had never come home.
Read said she set back out in her car to canvas the 2 square miles where the couple spent the night before.
“Now I have an immense sense of dread, a fright in me that I have not experienced before,” Read told ABC News’ Matt Gutman in a sit-down interview.
As she drove around the town, Read says she imagined possible scenarios that would explain O’Keefe’s disappearance, and she began to fear for the worst.
“I was worried he might’ve gotten hit by a plow. That was my first thought,” Read said. “It was the only explanation I could think of for why John disappeared in thin air.”
Read says she drove around Canton for 20 minutes before meeting up with McCabe and Kerry Roberts, another friend of O’Keefe's. The three women returned to O'Keefe's house, thinking he might have made his way home.
Read said she pointed out a broken taillight on the right side of her SUV.
“I had told both Jen and Kerry that I cracked my taillight. And I said, ‘I just hit my car on top of everything,’ but I didn't look at the damage. And both women said, ‘It's cracked. It's cracked. Calm down, you cracked your taillight. You're OK, let's go look for John,’” Read said.
Not finding John at his house, the group drove through blizzard conditions in the dark to the Fairview Road residence, the last place Read said she saw O’Keefe.
As they pulled up to the front lawn of the house, Read said she made a shocking discovery. She recalled seeing O’Keefe’s body lying motionless on the front snowbank.
Jennifer McCabe dialed 911 from the vehicle, while Read says she frantically attempted to administer CPR to O’Keefe, and press her body atop his to warm his freezing cold body with her own body heat.
“His eyes were shut, and he had spots of blood on different areas of his face,” Read told “20/20.” “It was just an odd feeling to know that I’m OK, but he’s here with me, and he’s dying. And I can’t warm him up.”
Minutes later, first responders began to flood the scene and administer aid to O’Keefe.
Read said she remembered being in shock and inconsolable. She says she called her father, and stated, “I don’t wanna live.” Her father called the police, who placed her on a psychiatric hold on account of her behavior and her statement threatening a risk of self-harm.
“I didn't have any ideation of harming myself. I just-- I-- I've never dealt with grief of this magnitude. And I just felt out of my skin,” Read told “20/20.”
“They took my phone, they took my clothes, they wouldn’t let me speak to anyone. Sometime later, about mid-morning, I saw John’s parents and brother pass in the ER and all go into the door two doors down,” Read said.
Despite the extensive efforts of countless medical professionals, O’Keefe succumbed to the injuries he sustained, and was pronounced deceased that morning. An autopsy found O’Keefe died of hypothermia and blunt force injuries to the head.
Tara Kerrigan will never forget learning the news about her friend of nearly 20 years.
“I hung up and I lost it,” Kerrigan told “20/20.” “I remember pounding on my dresser and just literally screaming, ’Not John O'Keefe,’ over and over.”
In a group interview with Matt Gutman, some of O’Keefe’s cousins shared how they hoped to remember him as “the light” of his family.
“He was always the sun. He would just light up a room,” one cousin said about O’Keefe.
Brendan Kane, O’Keefe’s longtime friend, told “20/20” it was O’Keefe’s dream to become a police officer. O’Keefe worked as a Boston police officer for 16 years, having followed his grandfather into a career in law enforcement. He became a surrogate father for his young niece and nephew, who were orphaned in 2014.
Karen Read was released from the hospital later that day. She said she and her dad went to see O’Keefe’s family at his house. Once at O’Keefe’s home, Read said she showed her dad the damage to her taillight.
“I showed my dad my light. It was cracked,” Karen Read said.
O’Keefe’s mother seemed to keep her distance, according to Read.
“They had pulled into the driveway before me. I was presuming she saw my cracked taillight and was thinking, ‘Did you hit my son?’ … I could sense from her that she was looking at me very warily.”
Read said she and her father gathered her belongings from O’Keefe’s bedroom and left.
“When we were driving home, I said to my father, ‘I gotta get an attorney.’”
John Jackson, one of O’Keefe’s friends, recalled in an interview with “20/20,” “She had hired an attorney. That was it. No more contact, which I find odd.”
This brief interaction marked the last time Read saw O’Keefe’s family before she was arrested on Feb. 1, 2022, and charged with manslaughter, motor vehicle homicide, and leaving the scene of a motor vehicle collision causing death. She pleaded not guilty in Stoughton District Court the following day.
On June 9, 2022, a Norfolk County grand jury indicted Read, upgrading her charges to second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating under the influence of alcohol, and leaving the scene of a collision causing death. Read was arraigned on the new charges, entering a not guilty plea in the Norfolk Superior Court in Dedham, MA.
The Norfolk County District Attorney’s Office presented the circumstances surrounding O’Keefe’s death as a drunken night out gone awry, where an allegedly intoxicated Read struck O’Keefe with her SUV and deserted his body in front of a private residence.
According to prosecutors, Read's blood alcohol content was between .07 and .08 when she was tested at the hospital at 9:08 a.m. after being transported from the scene. That's about nine hours after she and John had left the bar.
In all 50 states in America, if you are a .08 or above you are under the influence for the purpose of motor vehicle.
MSP Trooper Bukhenik, one of the primary homicide investigators in this case, testified about security footage pulled from the two bars Read and O’Keefe visited the night of the blizzard, counting each drink for the jury. Trooper Bukhenik clocked her alcohol consumption on Jan. 28, 2022 at roughly nine drinks consumed within three hours.
Read admits that she was drinking that night and was operating a motor vehicle, but says she felt fine to drive.
She tells “20/20” that she had probably four drinks in total, adding, “And not four that I completed either. I didn't drink-- maybe more than a few sips at the Waterfall."
Over the next year and a half, Read’s defense team presented an alternate account in hearings, filings and at press conferences of what they claimed happened the night that John O’Keefe died. In court motions and pre-trial hearings, they alleged that Read herself fell victim to an elaborate cover-up, positing that O’Keefe was murdered inside the Albert residence, his body later placed on a snowbank in the front yard. Her team described Read as a convenient outsider, framed for O’Keefe’s murder by several influential members of Canton’s tightknit community.
The prosecution and their witnesses who attended the afterparty on Fairview Road denied all these allegations of a murder or cover-up. The prosecution stating that evidence shows John O’Keefe never entered the Albert home. Furthermore, the prosecution says that O’Keefe was not murdered by anyone inside the residence, alleging that his injuries were sustained when Read hit him with her vehicle and insisting that those gathered inside had no idea O’Keefe was outside in the snow until he was discovered the next morning.
Read's trial began in April 2024 and lasted eight weeks.
On July 1, after five days of deliberations, Judge Beverly Cannone declared the case a mistrial after the jury of 12 said that they found themselves unable to reach consensus. Prosecutors will retry the case in 2025, with jury selection slated to begin on Jan. 27, 2025.
Read maintained she never hurt O’Keefe and that she is innocent.
Kane said that while he is disappointed that Read was not convicted in the weekslong trial, he has not lost hope in the pursuit of justice.
“So, at this point, as we sit now after the mistrial, that we are sitting at halftime,” Kane said. “And we have got a second half to let play out, some adjustments will be made and we hope that that will end up with a conviction.”
Although they hoped to see a resolution this summer, O'Keefe's cousins told "20/20" they will continue to appear in court until he receives justice.
"I think we were all waiting for it to be finally over so we can finally grieve," one of O'Keefe's cousins said in their interview with Gutman.
