The jury deciding Karen Read’s fate has said it is unable to reach a unanimous decision after eight weeks of testimony and four days of deliberations.
However, Judge Beverly Cannone sent them back to continue deliberating because some of their deliberations had ended early. The jury continued deliberating throughout the afternoon and is now scheduled to continue deliberating on Monday.
Jurors began deliberating on Tuesday and told the judge on Friday that they could not reach a unanimous decision on whether or not Read was responsible for the 2022 killing of her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O’Keefe. Read has denied the allegations.
If the jury cannot decide, the case would be over. However, the state could decide whether to retry Reed for murder. She faces second-degree murder, which is punishable by life in prison.
The jury’s deliberations come after eight weeks of witness testimony in the high-profile trial, which began in April amid a media storm and fueled by crime bloggers.
Read, a former adjunct professor at Bentley College, was charged with second-degree murder, intoxicated manslaughter and leaving the scene of an accident in connection with the January 2022 death of her boyfriend, John O’Keefe. The state said Read ran over and killed O’Keefe after their relationship deteriorated. The defense argues O’Keefe was killed in a fight with others and Read was framed for the murder.
In his closing argument on Tuesday, defense attorney Alan Jackson described a cancer of lies that had turned into a cover-up and told jurors they were “the only thing standing between Karen Read and the tyranny of injustice.”
“You have been lied to in this courtroom. Your job is to make sure you never look the other way,” he said in court.
But Assistant District Attorney Adam Lally told jurors that “there is no conspiracy.”
Lally began his closing argument with the words Read said, according to four witnesses, after O’Keefe was discovered on the snowy lawn: “The defendant repeatedly said, ‘I hit him. I hit him. Oh my God. I hit him.'”
“Those were the words that came out of the defendant’s mouth,” Lally said.
Prosecutors argued that Read dropped O’Keefe, 46, off at a house party in Canton hosted by co-worker Brian Albert after a night of drinking, then struck him while turning and drove away, leaving him to die in the snow.
When she returned hours later, she reportedly found O’Keefe’s snow-covered body in the front house. As emergency responders arrived, she could be heard repeatedly yelling “I hit him, I hit him,” witnesses said.
But Read’s defense attorney claimed that she was framed by someone who beat O’Keefe to death in Albert’s house and that he himself had been bitten by the family dog.
They claim the homeowner’s relationships with local and state police interfered with their investigation.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this case was a cover-up, plain and simple,” Jackson said during his closing argument.
The defense also argued that investigators focused on Read because she was a “convenient outsider” who spared them from considering other suspects, including Albert and other police officers who were at the party.
The jury of six men and six women deliberated behind closed doors in Norfolk County Superior Court, while a “sidewalk jury” of true crime bloggers and Read supporters gathered outside for days.
Many people became aware of the case because Aidan Kearney, aka Turtleboy, runs an online blog that tirelessly questions the prosecution. He is also accused of harassing witnesses. Kearney has been accused of witness intimidation and conspiracy, which he denies.
