Karen Read had chilling freakout after cop boyfriend John O’Keefe’s death: witness
A crazed Karen Read uttered a chilling question before she and two others found her Boston cop boyfriend dead in the snow, according to testimony from a key witness Tuesday.
“Did I hit him?” Read kept asking, her friend Jennifer McCabe recalled to jurors in the sensational murder trial. “Could I have hit him?”
Read, 45, is on trial for allegedly backing into Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, 46, with her Lexus SUV after a night of drinking and then leaving him to die as a snowstorm approached.
McCabe testified in a Dedham, Mass., courtroom that she spoke to a hysterical Read around 5:30 a.m. on Jan. 29, 2022 — and she told her pal that she’d gotten into a fight with O’Keefe the night before and she didn’t know where he was.
McCabe, Read and a third woman, Kerry Roberts, drove together to a home in nearby Canton, where Read claims to have dropped O’Keefe off the night before for a party his cop friend Brian Albert was hosting.
Both on the phone to McCabe and on the drive over to the house at 34 Fairview Road, an “erratic” Read kept asking “Did I hit him?” and “Could I have hit him?” McCabe recalled.
Despite the “white-out conditions” because of the snowstorm, when the trio pulled up, Read yelled, “There he is! Let me out!” McCabe said.
But McCabe said she couldn’t see O’Keefe because it was still dark out and there was “nothing but snow” everywhere.
Roberts turned to McCabe and said Read “is bats–t crazy,” McCabe testified.
She recalled how Read went to a spot in the snow and started “removing the snow from John’s face.”
“I was frozen,” McCabe said. “I was shocked. I couldn’t believe that was him just lying there.”
She described how Read was straddling O’Keefe’s body, “wiping snow off” him and screaming.
“It was him, but just, like, frozen,” McCabe testified, her voice breaking.
She said she called 911 as she went to the car to look for towels and blankets to warm O’Keefe up, but “I think I knew in that moment that John was dead.”
Even still, his friends tried to revive O’Keefe with CPR as they waited for the ambulance to arrive.
McCabe Googled “hos long to die in cold” around 6:30 a.m. that morning, prosecutors argue, claiming she did so at Read’s request.
But Read’s team has argued that the search was actually carried out hours earlier, around 2:30 a.m., when McCabe and Read weren’t together.
Read’s team says McCabe played a key role in a law enforcement cover-up against her. They claim she is a scapegoat and O’Keefe was actually killed in a fight with his pals at Albert’s house.
McCabe also testified for three days at Read’s first trial last year. She claimed that when they found O’Keefe’s body, Read said, “I hit him, I hit him, I hit him.”
McCabe’s testimony is set to resume Wednesday morning.
