Prosecutors say Karen read that he hit John O’Keefe in her SUV and died. On Thursday, medical inspectors testified about the wounds on the officers’ entire body and what they present.
Karen Reed’s second murder trial begins with a new ju judge
Karen Reed began her second trial last year after being charged with the 2022 death of Boston police officer John O’Keefe.
Karen’s ju judge took place in a murder trial in Massachusetts and gained the closest vision of the man’s battered body at the heart of the case.
Prosecutors predicted a photo of 45-year-old Boston police officer John O’Keefe’s bloody, wounded body, and continued to claim that the 45-year-old lady attacked her boyfriend with her black Lexus in drunken rage, putting him in the snow.
Reed’s lawyers say she was framed outside Canton, Massachusetts, due to a death that took place in January 2022, home to fellow Boston police officers.
O’Keefe’s wounds are a key point in the exam, which lies in the question of whether he was hit by something he read or hurt in other ways. Reed’s lawyers claimed that O’Keefe was beaten by other officers and that some wounds came from the animal attack.
Prosecutors called Massachusetts medical inspector Irini Scordi-Bello to testify about the wounds found along the officer’s body. Some were in line with the fall behind, she said. However, according to Scordi Bello, amputations of his arms, eyelids and nose are not evidence of a fall, and could be “consistent” with the punch.
He died of blunt trauma and hypothermia, Scordi Bello said, based on an autopsy.
Prosecutors’ testimony about O’Keefe’s wounds are seen the night before O’Keefe’s death, the day after the bomb was entered, allegedly made to the first responder, and the ju judges were seen with a state reading car that was damaged after O’Keefe’s death.
The Norfolk County case is the second trial of a reading material surrounding O’Keefe’s death. The 2024 trial ended with the judges. The long-standing legal saga of whodunnit has won massive plots from true crime fans around the country, spurring an array of podcasts, movies and TV shows.
Here’s more what happened on the 16th day of his trial from Dedham, Massachusetts:
Judge Beverly Canon rejected the ju appellant a few minutes before 4pm and heard debate from the defense team about new information he received from the forensic company openings about Reed’s Lexus infotainment system.
The revised data from the system shows a few seconds different time from the original lawyer, according to the original defense counsel Robert Alessi. Despite its small, changes change the timeline analysis and defense cases, Alessi told Canon. He asked to remove the report from trial.
Prosecutors are pushing for information to be included. They argue that the data does not change the analysis. They said that is an example of the dispersion between a Lexus watch and an iPhone.
Prosecutors also asked for more time to review new materials from the engineering and crash reconstruction company ARCCA, which they received on May 7th. The prosecutor requested that the open witness testify after the ARCCA witness. The defense said accepting the request would be “an extraordinary situation.”
Read’s defense team appeared to question whether O’Keefe had died elsewhere from where his body was found. Attorney Robert Alessi asked Scordi Bello about whether hypothermia could be caused by something other than a cold climate.
She suggested that sepsis, or the body’s extreme response to infection, was one of the only other reasons besides cold exposure. Scordi-Bello told defense attorney Robert Alessi he couldn’t come up with a “hypothetical scenario” for how a person died, instead relying on anatomical evidence combined with police reports.
The defense was asked whether O’Keefe’s head injury coincided with retreating on cold ground, Scordi Bello said.
“If there’s autumn in the back, that injury can be produced very well,” she told the ju judge.
But O’Keefe would not have lasted as his right arm, eyelids and nose fell back and smashed his head, Scordi Bello confirmed. O’Keefe’s eye injury was “consistent” with punches, she said.
The ulcer found in O’Keefe’s stomach supported the medical examiner’s conclusion that O’Keefe had partially died of hypothermia. Scordi-Bello told the defense that it was “potential” that the ulcer could have been caused by alcohol consumption.
During the prosecutor’s redirect, Scordi Bello said she noticed during her evaluation that she was allegedly aware of her saying, “I hit him, I hit him, I hit him.” She was also said that the taillights of the readings had been found by O’Keefe’s body.
Prosecutor Hank Brennan baked Scordi Bello on whether O’Keefe’s knee bruising and eye injuries matched “side swipes” and cuttings from the glass. She said, “Everything is possible.”
Scordi-Bello testified about the injuries found on O’Keefe’s body during an autopsy. It includes cuts in his upper right eyelid, scraps and tears in his nose, swelling of his bloody eyelids, and cuts ranging from a few millimeters to a maximum of 7 cm in his right arm.
O’Keefe also had scuffs on the back of his head and on the outside of his right knee. She said none of the scraps were more than skin deep. His rib bone appeared to have been fractured from an attempted resuscitation. He died of blunt trauma and hypothermia, Scordi Bello said, based on an autopsy. The prosecutor’s office could not determine whether his death was the result of an accident, a murder, or something else. O’Keefe’s temperature has dropped from its normal temperature of about 96.8 degrees to 80.1 degrees.
Based on her autopsy, Scordi Bello said O’Keefe died of blunt trauma and hypothermia. The prosecutor’s office could not determine whether his death was the result of an accident, murder, or something else.
Scordi Bello said O’Keefe likely lost consciousness at some point after the trauma of dull force.
During cross-examination, Hartnett confirmed that he reviewed fragments of O’Keefe’s clothing collected from the crime scene by Michael Proctor, who sent a crude text message while investigating O’Keefe’s death. Proctor was fired in March for unrelated reasons.
Read’s lawyers appeared to question whether Proctor properly handled the evidence. During previous testimony from a Massachusetts trooper, Reid’s defense appears to have increased the likelihood that Proctor planted a fragment of her taillight at the crime scene.
Courttv has been covering Read and criminal investigation lawsuits since early 2022, when O’Keefe’s body was found outside his home in Canton, Massachusetts.
You can see Courttv’s live feed of read court proceedings from Norfolk Superior Court in Dedham, Massachusetts. Minutes begin at 9am.
