The appeal made by the Massachusetts woman accused of killing her Boston police officer boyfriend in a snowy collision has been denied by the Massachusetts Supreme Court. She had sought to have her case dismissed based on double jeopardy after a tumultuous murder trial led to a hung jury.
Karen Read, aged 45, is now set to face trial for the second time as previously planned for April, facing charges of second-degree murder and leaving the scene of a fatal accident.
Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe lost his life due to blunt force trauma to the head and hypothermia during a snowstorm in January in Canton, Massachusetts, located approximately 15 miles from Boston. Prosecutors allege that Read struck him with her SUV and drove away following a drunken altercation. Read, on the other hand, claimed innocence, suggesting it was all an elaborate setup and that she had departed before any harm came to O’Keefe. The jury was unable to reach a consensus on which narrative to believe.
After a lower court denied her motion to dismiss following the mistrial, she appealed to the state’s highest court, which handed down a decision Tuesday rejecting her argument that jurors only deadlocked on one of the three charges. She wanted the remaining two thrown out.
Testimony from Massachusetts State Trooper Michael Proctor, one of the key investigators, severely hurt prosecutors in court.
Jurors were seen shaking their heads in court as Read’s defense team read some of his text messages.
In them, he called Read a “wack job,” a “babe … with no a–” and a “c—.” He wrote that he wished she would kill herself and joked about looking for nude selfies while searching her phone.
