At around 6 a.m. on a snowy January day in 2022, a sleepy residential street in Canton was ablaze with the blue lights of police cruisers, soon joined by an ambulance and fire truck as one of the three women surrounding the body of a Boston Police officer screamed and wailed.
When John O’Keefe was rushed away by ambulance to Brockton’s Good Samaritan Medical Center, where he would soon be pronounced dead, local police took the initial steps to collect evidence for a case that would ultimately be the investigative responsibility of the Massachusetts State Police unit assigned to the Norfolk DA’s office.
Over the course of the trial where Karen Read has defended herself since April 29 against charges including second-degree murder in the death of O’Keefe, the forensic evidence has trickled out among descriptions of the fateful Friday night into Saturday morning, Jan. 29, 2022, when O’Keefe would die.
“It’s a fascinating trial, it’s grabbed everyone’s attention across the country,” said Boston defense attorney William D. Kickham, one of the two experts the Herald spoke with to analyze what has been presented after four weeks of trial. “It’s an amalgam of jealousy, possible lies, possible sex, a number of human behaviors that combine to create a very compelling story.”
Chris Dearborn, a Boston defense attorney for three decades and a clinical law professor at Suffolk University Law School, said the police’s handling of the physical evidence in the case is “a ripe area for cross-examination and argument for the defense.”
“You have all the weird stuff with the texts, and the love interests and the oddities with the forensic evidence and the oddities with the cell phones,” he said. “There’s enough here that may not add up and give the jury pause. It just depends on whether or not that gives them enough pause for reasonable doubt and acquittal.”
Blood red SOLO cups
“Nothing about the scene was standard,” said Canton Police Lt. Paul Gallagher, who arrived at the scene along with the sun and took control following the initial witness statements and O’Keefe’s removal by ambulance.
He testified on the fifth day of trial, May 6, that he chose to use a leaf blower to combat the falling snow and remove layers of it to get to any evidence below.
He said he saw pink droplets that became redder as he removed more snow — O’Keefe’s blood. He didn’t have any actual evidence collection tools so he retrieved a set of red SOLO plastic cups — from a sealed bag, he stressed — from the home of a fellow officer who lived nearby. Gallagher collected the red snow in the cups, where it would thaw into a bloody mix.
Those cups then at some point were collected into a Stop & Shop grocery bag, as the officers who took the stand said they had to improvise at the scene. Ample portions of cross-examination of the officers targeted the storage methods and that the bag was seen within feet of Read’s Lexus SUV, which defense attorneys said could lead to cross-contamination.
“The fact that they used red SOLO cups ostensibly from an unopened package doesn’t change the calculus for me,” Dearborn said. “We think of college kids drinking beer and playing drinking games, that’s what we use red SOLO cups for.”
“I do appreciate that sometimes police need to be creative under pressure, but they have to expect to be thoroughly challenged by the defense, especially in a homicide case,” he added. “The general principle here is that jurors have the right to expect high-quality police work in how they maintain and preserve forensic evidence.”
Kickham similarly described the collection and retention of the evidence as “far less than typically ideal forensic, evidence collection conditions. … It may not be literally amateur, but it’s close.”
A broken co*cktail glass
Canton Police Lt. Michael Lank, who was a sergeant at the time, also said that a broken co*cktail glass was found at the scene. He and others say O’Keefe walked out of the Waterfall Bar and Grill in central Canton with just such a glass when heading to the afterparty at 34 Fairview Road, where he would be found dead or dying on the lawn that morning.
On May 7, Lank, wearing blue evidence gloves, removed the glass from an evidence box in the courtroom. The base and the jagged lower sides of the glass were all that remained of the only piece of physical evidence to enter the courtroom so far. Everything else has been shown as photos on a screen.
Days later, a taillight
Neither Lank nor Gallagher nor any other first responder testified to seeing any pieces of a broken taillight at the crime scene. But days after the homicide, in which prosecutors allege Read slammed her SUV into O’Keefe following a drunken fight and left him to die in the cold, then-Canton PD Chief Kenneth Berkowitz said he saw just such an item when he drove by in his car.
He dispatched Lank to photograph the large piece of red plastic. And more pieces were allegedly recovered, an allegation that has nearly brought defense attorneys to claim it was planted there. They hammered each Canton officer who took the stand if they saw any of the “45” pieces of taillight there that morning, and they each answered no.
“I think a prosecutor’s job is to be a constructionist while typically a defense lawyer is a deconstructionist and I think the best way to handle some of these legitimate questions about evidence … that the defense is going to argue should create a reasonable doubt,” Dearborn told the Herald, is for prosecutors “to focus on the big picture and acknowledge small deficiencies.
“The more they fight them the more they’re going to walk into jurors questioning how significant those deficiencies are,” he said.
Photos of Read’s Lexus shown in court show a missing or heavily busted passenger-side taillight. The jurors also got a first-person look at the vehicle on a field trip to 34 Fairview Road, with Read’s vehicle parked outside.
Defensive wounds
Of particular interest to Kickham is the photograph of O’Keefe’s arm, replete with scratches and other wounds.
“In and of themselves, the wounds are extremely suggestive of defensive wounds or an animal attack,” he told the Herald, indicating what he saw as “highly suggestive of animal scratches and tooth punctures.”
The defense has raised the theory that Chloe, a 70-pound German shepherd mix owned by Brian and Nicole Albert, the owners of 34 Fairview Road, could have participated in an assault on O’Keefe. They have developed a “third party culpability” theory that posits that Brian Albert, ATF Agent Brian Higgins, and Albert’s nephew Colin Albert, or any combination of the three, beat O’Keefe to death and framed Read.
“I realize that no canine DNA was found by officers responsible with evidence collection, but it is possible that it could have become degraded or lost in the process, possibly,” Kickham said.
‘Hos long to die in cold’
Central to the theory of a conspiracy to frame Read is exactly when Jennifer McCabe, Brian Albert’s sister-in-law, searched on her phone for “ho(w) long to die in cold.”
McCabe testified she did the search on her phone at 6:24 a.m. at the behest of Read, who was hysterical over O’Keefe’s body on the lawn and wanted to know how quickly hypothermia could set in.
But defense attorneys say that an analysis of her phone suggests she actually made the search at 2:27 a.m., hours before McCabe, Read and a woman named Kerry Roberts would find O’Keefe and call police. She said that’s not true and the only reason the analysis would show that is because she used the same browser window to perform the search that she was using in bed at the earlier time when she was looking for coverage of her daughter’s sports game from the previous evening.
“Even if her explanation is plausible, it’s still susceptible to two interpretations,” Dearborn said. “She still could have done it at 2:27 or 6:24, but if it’s not plausible, then there’s only one interpretation: that she did the internet search at 2:27.”
Kickham agreed: “I think the veracity of her testimony is going to turn on possible expert testimony offered in the form of search engine expertise, if it is forthcoming.”
