Karen Read’s father, Bill Read, has opened up about his family’s experience throughout his daughter’s three-and-a-half-year legal battle in a candid podcast interview. His 45-year-old daughter faced murder and other charges in the January 29, 2022, death of her former boyfriend, John O’Keefe, a Boston police officer. The prosecution alleged that she had mowed him down with a Lexus SUV and left him to die in a blizzard, but the defense argued that she had not struck him and that the police investigation was faulty. After a mistrial, jurors found her not guilty of all homicide-related charges and guilty of driving under the influence of alcohol.
Bill Read, speaking with Billy Bush on his ‘Hot Mics’ show, said he believed the investigation was corrupt and that his daughter would not have fought so hard if she had something to hide. He urged citizens to ‘take back your government’ and warned that the next Karen Read could be anyone if the criminal justice system remains unchanged. The case has sparked a demand for an independent audit of the local police department and internal investigations into several law enforcement officials involved in the case.
Karen Read and O’Keefe spent the night of January 28, 2022, drinking in Canton, Massachusetts, before driving to an after party at the home of another Boston cop named Brian Albert. Prosecutors and the defense disagree about what had happened after they had gotten there just after midnight. At around 6 a.m., Read and two friends returned to the address to find O’Keefe dead on the front lawn under a dusting of snow. Police initially charged her with drunken driving manslaughter and fleeing the scene, but prosecutors later secured an indictment for the more serious charge of second-degree murder. Jurors ultimately cleared her of all of those allegations but agreed that she had drunk alcohol before getting behind the wheel.
Read, who went up to every sidebar with her lawyers at trial, already had a prominent Boston-area attorney, David Yannetti, when she brought in Alan Jackson, the Los Angeles lawyer who added a jolt to her legal team at trial. For her second trial, she also added New York’s Robert Alessi. Bush also asked Read about his own relationship with O’Keefe. Could he have seen him as a son-in-law if things got that far?