At Karen Read’s murder trial, prosecutors accuse her of drunken crash while defense alleges a vast police cover-up

Is Karen Read a rage-filled cop killer, or the convenient patsy of a vast police cover-up? That’s the question put to a Massachusetts jury on Tuesday in closing arguments of her murder trial in a case that has riveted the Bay State.

Is Karen Read a rage-filled cop killer, or the convenient patsy of a vast police cover-up? That’s the question put to a Massachusetts jury on Tuesday in closing arguments of her murder trial in a case that has riveted the Bay State. The case stems from the death of Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, whose body was found bruised and battered in the snow on January 29, 2022, outside the home of a fellow Boston police officer in the suburb of Canton. Prosecutors have alleged Read and O’Keefe, who were dating, had gotten into an argument that night, and that she drunkenly drove a vehicle into him and fled the scene, leaving him to die in the cold. “What the constellation of the facts and the evidence ineluctably demonstrate here is that the defendant drove her vehicle in reverse at 24.2 miles per hour for 62.5 feet, struck Mr. O’Keefe, causing those catastrophic head injuries, leaving him incapacitated and freezing him to death,” prosecutor Adam Lally said in closing arguments Tuesday. In contrast, her defense has accused off-duty police inside that Canton home of fatally beating O’Keefe, dumping his body on the lawn and then conspiring through fabricated evidence and false testimony to frame Read.