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The jury foreman in Karen Read’s retrial on murder charges is the latest to open up and blame police missteps for the outcome, declaring the vindicated defendant not just not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but completely “innocent” in a new televised interview.
“Karen Read is innocent, and she didn’t do this crime,” Juror No. 1 told “Today” on Tuesday morning. “No one could prove that she did this crime, so I looked at her from Day 1 as an innocent woman that needed to be proven guilty, and I don’t think any of that was shown in this process.”
Jurors rejected all homicide-related charges last week, convicting her only of drunken driving after she spent the night drinking cocktails and driving around Canton, Massachusetts, during a blizzard.
JUROR REVEALS WHY KAREN READ WALKED FREE IN BOYFRIEND’S DEATH
Prosecutors alleged that she backed her 2021 Lexus LX 570 SUV into her then-boyfriend, Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, and then left him to die on the ground in the cold with a fractured skull.
The state presented broken taillight fragments collected from the crime scene, which matched smaller pieces recovered from O’Keefe’s clothes and a chunk missing from Read’s Lexus.
KAREN READ MURDER CASE VERDICT REACHED AFTER DEADLOCKED FIRST TRIAL
However, police missteps doomed the case, and the jury found the state’s evidence unconvincing. Defense experts dismissed claims from their counterparts working for the prosecution, who had suggested that the vehicle struck O’Keefe with a glancing blow, sending him tumbling backward to hit his head on the ground.
Despite evidence showing his phone stopped moving at the time Read hit the gas in reverse, jurors saw no link between black box data from the SUV and the victim’s final recorded movement.
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“People had questions, and we used the evidence to answer their questions, and we didn’t try to go down these rabbit holes where we’re just getting lost in all these other things that were thrown at us in court or whatever,” the foreman, who did not reveal his name, told the interviewers. “We just had to lock down and figure it out through the evidence.”
In a statement to Boston 25, Read’s attorney, Alan Jackson, harshly criticized Special Prosecutor Hank Brennan.
“The jury has spoken, but Special Prosecutor Hank Brennan, in an egregious breach of prosecutorial ethics, has tried to publicly shame and discredit that very jury. For him to attempt to supplant his personal views for that of the jury is a desperate attempt to save face in the wake of a unanimous rejection of the prosecution’s case,” Jackson said. “The only job of an ethical prosecutor is to seek the truth in a just and fair manner. The Commonwealth fell wildly short of that responsibility. Theirs was not an effort to find justice for John O’Keefe. Rather, it was a personal vendetta against Karen Read by DA Michael Morrissey and his hand-picked prosecutors—and it cost the people of Norfolk County millions”
Jackson said the trial “never should have gone to trial in the first place.”
“The Commonwealth’s defamatory public comments ring hollow to the very constituents they are supposed to serve. It is now crystal clear that disgraced DA Michael Morrissey has no interest in actually seeking justice for John O’Keefe by identifying and prosecuting the real killer or killers. The Commonwealth would rather simply condemn the jury and its fair and lawful verdict,” Jackson said.
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The lead investigator was fired after sending explicit text messages about Read and the progress of the investigation to a group of friends – people who were unauthorized to receive confidential details about the case.
O’Keefe, 46, was a Boston police officer who had taken in his orphaned niece and nephew after their parents died within months of one another.
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O’Keefe’s niece testified at trial that he had a toxic relationship with Read and indicated he wanted to call it off in the weeks before his death.
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In an earlier interview with the Boston Herald, the foreman said he had ties to another high-profile local case. He knew the Boston Marathon bombers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, as well as an 8-year-old victim of their terror attack, Martin Richard.
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