Karen Read trial live updates: Can crash reconstruction expert help the defense?

Yahoo

06-06-2025

The second murder trial of Karen Read resumed Friday with testimony from a defense accident reconstruction witness, after the trial took a one-day pause due to sweltering heat in the Massachusetts court room.
Daniel Michael Wolfe, an accident reconstruction expert, began testifying about his analysis of whether Read could have killed her Boston police officer boyfriend John O'Keefe with her car.
Read's defense team has sought to prove that she was framed for the death of O'Keefe, who was found underneath the snow outside the home of another cop in January 2022 after the couple went out drinking one night with friends.
Prosecutors say Read backed into O'Keefe with her Lexus SUV in a drunken rage after dropping him off at the home for a house party and then left him to die outside during a historic blizzard. She has been charged with second-degree murder, vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated and leaving the scene of a collision resulting in death.
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More: Karen Read trial: Prosecution rests its case after 6 weeks. What's next in the case?
Earlier in the week, jurors heard from a woman who went to the bar with Read and O'Keefe the night before his body was found and a Canton, Massachusetts, snow plow driver who said he did not see O'Keefe's body in the yard of now-retired Boston Police Officer Brian Albert as he passed by the morning of Jan. 29, 2022.
This is her second trial, after her first ended last year in a hung jury.
Jury instructions filed by Read's lawyers suggest that the Massachusetts woman may not testify in the retrial. They include a section informing the jury of Read's Fifth Amendment right not to testify, telling them they 'may not hold that against her.'
Christopher Dearborn, a law professor at Suffolk University in Boston who has followed the case closely, said the instructions are likely a 'harbinger' that Read's attorneys are not going to call her to the stand, though he noted that they could change their mind.
'Frankly, I don't think it would make a lot of sense to call her at this point,' Dearborn said, noting the number of public statements Read has made that could be used against her.
The court has already heard from Read in the trial through clips prosecutors played of interviews conducted in which she questioned whether she 'clipped' O'Keefe and admitted to driving while inebriated.
Dearborn told USA TODAY that there are two schools of thought around whether to include a section on a defendant's right not to testify in jury instructions. Some defense lawyers don't include the section because they don't want to "draw a bull's eye" around the fact that the defendant didn't testify and cause jurors to "speculate," Dearborn said.
Other times, he said, its the "elephant in the room" and the specific instructions telling the jury they can't hold the defendant's lack of testimony against them are necessary.
CourtTV has been covering the case against Read and the criminal investigation since early 2022, when O'Keefe's body was found outside a Massachusetts home.
You can watch CourtTV's live feed of the Read trial proceedings from Norfolk Superior Court in Dedham, Massachusetts. Proceedings began at 9 a.m. ET.
Contributing: Christopher Cann, USA TODAY
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Karen Read trial updates: Defense turns to crash reconstruction expert