Your Questions About Karen Read's Contentious—Answered

Karen Read was arrested within days of John O’Keefe’s death and arraigned on charges by February 2, 2022. She pleaded not guilty and was released on $80,000 bail. Her trial began on April 16, 2024, more than two years after the incident.

By June 21, the prosecution had called 68 witnesses and rested their case, while Karen Read’s defense called only six witnesses before resting theirs on June 24. Closing arguments occurred on June 25, and jury deliberation was over by July 1.

Unfortunately, after 25 hours of deliberation, the jury could not reach a unanimous decision, and Judge Beverly Cannone declared a mistrial.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has stated that they intend to retry the case.

While that all sounds fairly cut-and-dried—albeit inconclusive—the road to get there was far from smooth, and controversy continues to beset the case, even surrounding the declaration of mistrial.

According to Karen Read’s defense team, several jurors have said that the jury found Read not guilty of both the charges of motor vehicle homicide and leaving the scene of a deadly crash, with only the manslaughter charge deadlocked.

Since Massachusetts allows partial verdicts, this would, if true, prevent Read from being tried on those charges a second time, due to double jeopardy rules.

Again, however, the prosecution tells a different story.

The jury “did not reach any verdicts partial or otherwise,” according to the prosecution, who said that “the jury’s communications to the court explicitly indicated an impasse on all charges, and the court carefully considered alternatives before declaring a mistrial.”

For now, the identities of the jurors have been kept secret, in part due to the controversy and publicity surrounding the case, with jurors apparently stating that they feared for their safety in an anonymous court filing.

Even before the Karen Read trial had begun, it was a high-profile case, already with an army of both supporters and detractors who either believed that Karen Read was guilty or innocent.

The judge in the case established a 200-foot “buffer zone” around the courthouse, in order to maintain an unbiased jury pool. Outside of this zone, however, protestors gathered, including some wearing shirts or carrying signs that read “Free Karen Read.”

For those who wanted a look inside the courtroom, on the other hand, the questions became, “Is the Karen Read trial televised?” and “Where can I watch the Karen Read trial live?”

Several stations ran live coverage of the trial, including NECN, NBC Boston, and various streaming platforms, as well as the NBC10 Boston YouTube channel. 

As of this moment, there is no place to watch the Karen Read trial live, because the case ended in a mistrial back in July. At the time of this writing, the retrial has tentatively been set for January 27 of next year, just two days before the third anniversary of O’Keefe’s death.

When the retrial begins, the Karen Read case will probably once more be watched live by thousands of people, likely on the same networks and streaming platforms where it was available before.

One of the reasons why the highly publicized Karen Read trial ended in a deadlocked jury and a mistrial is because of the conflicted nature of the investigation into the circumstances surrounding John O’Keefe’s death.

Because John O’Keefe was a 16-year veteran of the Boston Police Department, whose former partner had been featured on the reality TV show Boston’s Finest, and because he died outside the home of another retired Boston PD officer, the investigation was a personal one for the authorities, and the defense was able to indicate numerous potential conflicts of interest.

Chief among these was Massachusetts State Trooper Michael Proctor, one of the lead investigators in the case, who was grilled over his close friendship with several of the witnesses, including Chris Albert, the brother of Brian Albert, whose home was the site of John O’Keefe’s death.

Also introduced into evidence were texts Proctor sent in which he called Read and her defense attorney derogatory names, said that Read should “kill herself,” and joked about finding nude photos when searching her phone.

As Michael Casey reported for the AP, Proctor was “a gift to the defense.”

This all helped to bolster the claims of Karen Read’s defense that their client was the victim of a frame job to cover up the actual cause of John O’Keefe’s death, which they claimed happened inside Brian Albert’s home at the hands of someone else.

Though the judge blocked the defense from using what is known as a “third-party culprit defense” in their opening statements, some possibilities as to an alternate culprit came to light through testimony, among them Brian Higgins.

An ATF agent, Higgins was at the home of Brian Albert on the night of O’Keefe’s death. Higgins had engaged in a flirtatious text exchange with Karen Read just days before the incident, and he disposed of his phone and SIM card a couple of months later. When asked why, he claimed that a suspect that he had been investigating had gotten his phone number. 

Brian Albert had a boxing background, and he and Higgins were seen “play fighting” on security cam footage from the Waterfall bar, which the defense characterized as practicing their fighting techniques.

There were also some unexplained phone calls between the two men at around two a.m. on the night in question, which they characterized as “butt dials.”

The controversial nature of much of the testimony in the Karen Read trial has resulted in several investigations into the conduct of the authorities handling the case.

Members of the investigating team testified as witnesses for the defense in the trial, and the activities of Massachusetts State Trooper Michael Proctor led him to be suspended without pay following a duty hearing. He wasn’t the only one, either.

Kevin Albert, a detective in the Canton Police Department and another brother of Brian Albert, was placed on leave following Proctor’s testimony.

Despite the “Free Karen Read” slogans sported by her defenders, Karen Read herself is not in jail. She has actually been out on bail since 2022, where she will theoretically remain until her retrial.

For those wondering if there is an update to the case, Karen Read's retrial is currently scheduled for January 2025.

What happens after that is anyone’s guess. We’ll all just have to tune in once again to watch the Karen Read trial live to find out.