Karen Read retrial followers wait for jury's decision

Flint McColgan, Boston Herald on Jun 16, 2025

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BOSTON — It’s Karen Read retrial verdict watch time in Dedham.

Attorneys made their closing arguments to jurors in Norfolk Superior Court there on Friday before Judge Beverly J. Cannone sent seven women and five men away to deliberate the fate of the 45-year-old college lecturer and financial analyst from Mansfield.

Read is charged with murder in the second degree, manslaughter while operating a motor vehicle under the influence of liquor, and leaving the scene of an accident resulting in death. There are lesser charges jurors can consider under the manslaughter charge if they so wish.

Prosecutor Hank Brennan in his closing said that the story of how Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, Read’s boyfriend, lost his life on Jan. 29, 2022, was “simple.”

“Ms. Read was with Mr. O’Keefe and she got drunk. She drank. She was two to three times over the legal limit and they went to a party, an after party, and they were fighting,” Brennan said. “… She got drunk, she hit him, she left him to die. It’s that simple.”

But defense attorney Alan Jackson says that story falls apart because the experts agree that “There was no collision. There was no collision. There was no collision.”

The prosecution could only feign a case, he asserted, because “their investigation was flawed from the start because their investigator was corrupted from the start by bias, personal loyalties.”

He said that for this case, “reasonable doubt abounds.”

Jurors deliberated for roughly 1 hour and 45 minutes on Friday before being dismissed for the weekend.

In Read’s first trial last year, Cannone declared a mistrial after jurors said they couldn’t come to a verdict following five days of deliberation.

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