A crash reconstructionist whose testimony is expected to be key to Karen Read’s defense admitted on the stand Monday, without jurors present, that he sent notes to her team during the first trial and received information about prior testimony despite a sequestration order.
Dr. Daniel Wolfe testified during the first trial that damage to Read’s SUV – the alleged murder weapon – was inconsistent in regard to a collision with John O’Keefe, the Boston police officer found dead on a colleague’s front lawn during a blizzard on Jan. 29, 2022.
He took the stand again Monday as part of a contentious evidence hearing as special prosecutor Hank Brennan raised issues with delays in discovery a week into Read’s second murder trial; the first ended with a deadlocked jury.
He admitted to sharing talking points with the defense during the first trial, apparently violating a sequestration order by receiving information on prior witness testimony, and later discussing the case with her defense on the encrypted messaging app, Signal.
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Judge Beverly Cannone sent the jurors home at lunchtime. Court resumed with a previously scheduled hearing involving crash reconstruction experts from the ARCCA firm without jurors present, with the fate of their expected testimony in the balance.
Brennan’s team previously tried to have them excluded from the retrial, and he has repeatedly accused the defense and ARCCA of slow-walking expert witness discovery disclosures. Wolfe, one of two ARCCA forensic scientists who testified during Read’s first trial, said he doesn’t expect the firm’s work to be finished until May 7, more than a month after the trial began.
The defense has argued that the delay is caused by the prosecution’s slow handling of its own expert disclosures, which were given to the defense in late March. Jury selection began on April 1.
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But before Brennan’s questions turned to the delay, he got Wolfe to testify that he shared talking points with the defense during Read’s first trial and became aware of prior witness testimony despite a sequestration order.
“When you were receiving information from the Department of Justice about witness testimony, that was before you testified, correct?” Brennan asked.
“Correct,” Wolfe said, testifying that he received verbal communications about “some key things,” including DNA evidence and O’Keefe’s outstretched arm, information he did not include in his expert reports prior to taking the stand.
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“And is that how, at trial, even though you had no evidence that was produced as part of your report or to consider for your report, that you knew that there was DNA evidence because of the intermediary?” Brennan asked.
“Because of the Department of Justice? Yes,” Wolfe said.
“Did you know there was a sequestration order in this case that you were not supposed to consider or review other witnesses’ testimony or information?” Brennan asked.
“I was never made aware of that,” Wolfe said.
Wolfe and Dr. Andrew Renstchler, the other ARCCA expert, testified without jurors present as Cannone weighed whether their new findings, which have not been finalized, should be presented to jurors. Cannone asked Rentschler whether he could have the findings ready before May 7 if she ordered it.
“If you order me to do so, I mean I could,” he said.
The experts testified during Read’s first trial that the damage to Read’s car and O’Keefe’s head was not consistent with an impact between the two.
ARCCA was working for the federal government during the first trial and was supposed to be independent.
Before Cannone sent jurors home for the day, Ian Whiffin, a digital forensics expert with the firm Cellebrite, took the stand to interpret information recovered from the phones of both O’Keefe, the victim, and Jennifer McCabe, a witness who was present at the address around the time police allege Read struck her boyfriend with an SUV and also when she returned hours later and discovered him on the ground.
His testimony knocked down two key defense theories from the first trial: first, McCabe made a hypothermia-related Google search hours before anyone knew O’Keefe was lying in the snow; second, O’Keefe may have been injured at a party inside 34 Fairview Road and then left on the front lawn to die.
One issue is the timing of a search found on McCabe’s phone, where she looked up the phase, “hos (sic) long to die in cold.”
The defense has claimed the search happened at 2:27 a.m. and was deleted. Prosecutors contend the search happened in the 6 a.m. hour, after O’Keefe had been discovered with trauma to his head and signs of hypothermia.
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Whiffin testified that the 2:27 timestamp is related to the time when McCabe opened a new tab in her phone’s internet browser. But no search was made at that time. Instead, the search came hours later in the same tab. His testimony supported the prosecution’s timeline.
He also testified regarding O’Keefe’s final movements.
Whiffin used a combination of location pings, Apple Health records, phone battery temperature and the phone’s Doppler feature to piece together O’Keefe’s route from the Waterfall Bar and Grille, where he left around midnight, and the front lawn of 34 Fairview Road, where he was found with mortal injuries nearly six hours later.
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Combined, they show O’Keefe stopped answering his phone shortly after 12:30 a.m. while near a flagpole outside the address, and it didn’t move again until he was discovered around 6:04 a.m.
Around that time, paramedics lifted his body onto a stretcher, and the battery temperature, no longer insulated beneath him, fell rapidly before heating up once it was picked up by another person.
Prosecutors used his testimony to shoot down a defense theory that O’Keefe was injured somewhere else and moved to where his remains were recovered the next morning.
Read has pleaded not guilty. Her defense argued in opening statements last week that her SUV never struck O’Keefe.
Prosecutors allege that after spending hours drinking, she backed into O’Keefe during a drunken argument outside the home, where other acquaintances were inside for an after-party, and drove away, leaving him to die in a snowstorm.
Whiffin is expected to return to the stand Tuesday for cross-examination at 9 a.m.
