Attorneys for a Massachusetts professor accused of killing her husband, a police officer, in January 2021 after she allegedly hit him with her vehicle while intoxicated say new evidence could help exonerate her.
A Norfolk County grand jury in June 2022 indicted Bentley University Professor Karen Read, 42, of Mansfield, for second-degree murder, motor vehicle manslaughter, and leaving the scene of a collision, which apparently caused 46-year-old Boston Police Office John O’Keefe’s death.
Read’s attorneys, however, say phone evidence implicates Boston Police Officer Brian Albert and his sister-in-law, Jennifer McCabe, in O’Keefe’s murder, according to an April 12 motion obtained by Law & Crime and local reports.
“Ms. McCabe, the government’s seminal witness, Googled, “hos [sic] long to die in cold” at 2:27 a.m. on January 29, 2022, exactly two hours after O’Keefe was last seen walking towards the Albert Residence by Ms. Read,” the motion states.
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Investigators said Read drove O’Keefe to Albert’s home on Fairview Road in Canton shortly after midnight on Jan. 29, 2021, after drinking. That morning around 6, authorities found O’Keefe on the ground outside the Canton home just before a nor’easter struck the town with 21 inches of snow.
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Authorities transported the off-duty officer to Good Samaritan Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead several hours later.
Albert and McCabe were home at the time, but both witnesses told investigators they never saw O’Keefe make it into the house that evening before McCabe found his body outside the next morning.
Read then apparently became worried when she did not hear back from O’Keefe later on and returned to the Canton home on the morning on Jan. 29, where she and two friends, including McCabe, found him on the ground with cuts, both of his eyes swollen shut, and his clothes covered in blood and vomit, according to the motion and NBC News Boston.
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Read repeatedly asked McCabe, “Could I have hit him?” and “Did I hit him?” at the scene that morning after noticing one of her taillights was shattered – evidence the state is using against Read.
But defense attorney David Yannetti is now arguing that the deleted Google search on McCabe’s phone “completely undermines the prosecution’s theory of the case.”
“[T]hree hours before Jennifer McCabe had any reason to suspect O’Keefe hadn’t gone home with Ms. Read, three hours before she inserted herself into Ms. Read’s search for O’Keefe and delayed her return to the Albert Residence, and three hours before her ‘discovery’ of his lifeless body in the cold snow of her brother-in-law’s front lawn, Ms. McCabe had only one thing on her mind: how long does it take to die in the cold,” the motion states.
The court filing continues: “What’s even more shocking, is that the very next day, before turning her phone over to law enforcement, Ms. McCabe took calculated steps to purge her phone of this inculpatory search and, at the same time, attempted to delete her communications with Brian Albert and remove a screenshot of his contact information from her phone, which she had obviously shared with someone that morning.”
Read’s defense is also arguing that the state withheld cellphone evidence for more than a year and failed to investigate McCabe and Albert as suspects.
The Boston Police Department described O’Keefe as “a kind person” who was “dedicated to his family” in a February 2022 statement after his death.
