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Karen Read told reporters outside the courthouse in Dedham, Massachusetts, Tuesday that she will not be taking the stand in her own defense and that her final witness is a biomechanical engineer who will discuss John O’Keefe’s fatal injuries and how they could – or could not – have been inflicted.
“I am not testifying,” she said between the courthouse steps and a waiting SUV. She added that she is ready for the case to go into jurors’ hands after 30 days of testimony.
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Earlier Tuesday, another defense expert testified that O’Keefe did not hit the back of his head and suffer fatal injuries on the lawn where Read found him the morning after prosecutors allege she clipped him with her Lexus SUV and left him to die in a blizzard, according to a defense expert.
“If you fall back on a flat surface, you get, many times the tear you get in the scalp can be more like a star because you just hit one part, and then the tears go and kind of a star pattern,” testified Dr. Elizabeth Laposata, pointing to an evidence photo not shown on the courthouse video stream.
“And also, because you would not have those vertical, discrete vertical scraping of the skin, you, you would tend to if you fell back on grass, you would tend to see, you might see grass in the wound, or you would tend to see an irregular kind of crisscross pattern of the flattened grass. And that’s not what we have here on Mr. O’Keefe.”
But after she delivered that testimony, Judge Beverly Cannone agreed that prosecutors could introduce issues from her past to attempt to impeach her credibility on the witness stand – some of which the doctor dismissed as “bulls—.”
Laposata resigned from her role as chief medical examiner of the state of Rhode Island in 2005 amid an audit into her leadership of the office, claims that hundreds of autopsy reports had languished in a backlog and criticism over her delayed response to a 2003 nightclub fire that killed 100 people, according to prosecutors and contemporaneous news reports.
In a hearing without jurors present, special prosecutor Hank Brennan also raised issues about past cases in which he said she testified as a “hired gun” and lacked independent credibility. Cannone said he could bring up her past but not the unrelated cases.
With jurors in the room, Laposata agreed that she was paid for her consulting work on criminal cases but said she received “negative press” in 2003 and 2005 that she described as without basis.
“We looked up all the phone records and provided it to the newspapers, and showed that nobody called me to go,” she said, about the scene of the Station Nightclub fire. “I would have gone if I needed to. I had my investigator there, so it was just bulls—. No, it was, erroneous stuff.”
Laposata testified that in her expert opinion, O’Keefe hit his head on an uneven surface – one she said she didn’t see in photographs of the lawn at 34 Fairview Road in Canton, Massachusetts, where O’Keefe was found under a blanket of snow around 6 a.m. on Jan, 29, 2022.
“But that ridge also, it wasn’t smooth,” she testified. “It had some little grainy, grainy things sticking up on it.”
While she agreed that blunt force trauma to the head killed O’Keefe, she also said she did not see signs of hypothermia, alleging that the second cause of death in his official autopsy was misdiagnosed.
Laposata’s testimony also contradicted the testimony of Dr. Aizik Wolf, a brain surgeon who took the stand for the prosecution earlier in the trial and said O’Keefe’s skull fracture showed “classic” signs of a fall.
“The only way he could get this kind of an injury was to fall backwards, hit the back of his head, and then the resulting energy forces going into his brain, into the base of his skull,” said Wolf, who testified that he’d seen numerous injuries, often fatal, from backward falls in icy Minnesota weather early in his career.
“This is what happens when soft tissue hits a solid ground,” he testified.
Read’s defense scored a minor victory before jurors arrived in court Tuesday for the 30th day of her murder trial in the death of O’Keefe, her former boyfriend and a Boston police officer.
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Attorney Alan Jackson asked Cannone to reconsider an order yesterday blocking defense witness Laposata from testifying about dog bites.
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After a contentious back and forth with Brennan, which saw the two talking over one another and raising their voices, Cannone denied the request but also offered a compromise.
“In her experience, Mr. Jackson, you have to lay a foundation in her experience saying animal bites,” Cannone said. “This is consistent with what she has seen in an animal bite.”
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Laposata is a forensic pathologist and professor at Brown University’s medical school, whom Jackson described as “absolutely peerless,” although she resigned from her prior role as Rhode Island’s chief medical examiner amid an audit that found her office let hundreds of incomplete autopsies languish under her watch, according to local reports from the time.
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She returned to the stand once jurors arrived, and she explained the internal injuries to O’Keefe’s brain and said pressure on the brain stem from internal swelling and bleeding as a result of the fracture is what killed him.
The cut over his right eye, however, was caused by a different impact. She said it did not appear to have been inflicted by the spoiler on the back of Read’s SUV.
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