Jurors hear about Karen Read’s blood alcohol level as murder trial enters fifth week
A woman accused of leaving her Boston police officer boyfriend for dead in a snowbank after a night of drinking was still legally drunk about or nearly eight hours later, a former state police toxicologist testified Tuesday .
Prosecutors say Karen Read dropped John O’Keefe off at a house party hosted by a fellow officer in January 2022, struck him with her SUV and then drove away. Read has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder, and her defense team claims the homeowner’s relationship with local and state police tainted the investigation. They also say she was framed and that O’Keefe was beaten in the house and left outside.
As the highly publicized trial entered its fifth week, jurors heard from Nicholas Roberts, who analyzed blood test results from the hospital where Read was evaluated after O’Keefe’s body was discovered. He calculated that her blood alcohol content at 9 a.m., the time of the blood test, was between 0.078% and 0.083%, right around the legal limit for intoxication in Massachusetts. Based on a police report suggesting her last drink was at 12.45pm, her peak blood alcohol level would have been between 0.135% and 0.292%, he said.
Multiple witnesses have described Read frantically asking, “Did I hit him?” before O’Keefe was found or said afterward, “I hit him.” Others have said that the couple had a stormy relationship and that O’Keefe tried to end it.
O’Keefe had raised his niece and nephew, and they told jurors Tuesday that they frequently heard arguments between him and Read. O’Keefe’s niece described the relationship as “good in the beginning, but bad in the end,” according to Fox25 News, although the cousin said they were never physically violent.
The defense, which has been allowed to present third-party evidence, argues that investigators focused on Read because she was an “easy outsider” who kept them from considering other suspects. Those they implicated include Brian Albert, owner of the Canton home where O’Keefe died, and Brian Higgins, a federal agent who was there that night.
Higgins, a special agent with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, testified last week about exchanging flirtatious text messages with Read in the weeks before O’Keefe’s death. On Tuesday, he acknowledged that he had retrieved only those messages before throwing away his phone during the murder investigation.
Higgins said he replaced the phone because someone he was investigating for work had gotten his number. He got a new phone and number on September 29, 2022, a day before he got a court order to keep his phone, and threw the old one away a few months later. When questioning Higgins on the witness stand, Read’s attorney suggested the timing was suspicious.
“You knew when you threw that phone and the destroyed SIM card in the dumpster that from that day on, no one would ever have access to the contents of what you and Brian Albert had discussed via text messages on your old phone. said attorney David Yannetti.