In crying testimony, the mother of a Boston police officer told Wednesday how her son was discovered without responding in a snow bank and played comments about her in the interviews of the media of Karen Read, whom prosecutors accuse of killing the officer.
Peggy O’Kefe testified that he received a call around January 6, January 29, 2022, from a friend of her son John O’Kefe who was reading when he discovered the officer who did not respond in the front garden of Brian Albert, then Sergeant with the Boston Police Department.
“She said: ‘John was found in a snow bank,” O’Keefe recalled. “I didn’t understand. I said: ‘What do you mean?’ She is like: ‘He found him in the snow.
O’Keefe did not testify during the first widely publicized re -trial, which ended with a jury hung last summer.
Reading, 45, was accused of second -degree murder, homicide of motor vehicles while driving under the influence and abandoning the scene of a collision causing death.
In the opening statements on Tuesday, accused prosecutors read about John O’Keefe, 46, and leaving him for dead outside Albert’s house in the Boston suburbs in a snowy morning in January 2022.
Defensor lawyer Alan Jackson blamed the murder to others who were at home and said Read was a victim of police misconduct and a cover -up.
Peggy O’Kefe said Wednesday that with reading in her vehicle, her son’s friend picked them up and led them to the hospital where she was taken to John O’Keefe.
At a time during the trip, she testified, she asked her read what happened to her son. Read replied that they had gone to a party and that she had left him there.
“Did you leave it there?” O’Keefe remembered having asked him. “She said: ‘Yes, I left it there.'”
The prosecutors have said that Read left John O’Keefe in Albert’s house and began to move away, but then put his SUV Lexus in reverse and beat him fatally.
According to the defense story, there was no collision and reading saw John O’Keefe enter Albert’s house, where he was probably beaten and bitten by Albert’s dog. (During the first trial, Albert testified that John O’Kefe did not enter his house).
Peggy O’Kefe testified that Read did not tell him if he left his son inside or outside Albert’s house.
Once she was in the hospital, Peggy O’Kefe testified, the officials took her through the emergency room when she saw read.
“She started screaming, ‘Is he dead?'” O’Keefe recalled.
Towards the end of the almost 20 minutes of O’Kefe testimony, the special lawyer and the main prosecutor Hank Brennan referred to an interview that reads given for a documentary for discovery of investigations.
Brennan sought to admit READ comments for the discovery of research and “20/20” about Peggy O’Keefe because they show their “consciousness of guilt,” he said.
The judge of the Superior Court of the County of Norfolk, Beverly Cannone, did not immediately rule on the matter.
The research clip showed Read describing how he saw Peggy O’Keefe in his kitchen in the hours after the hospital trip. Read recalled that O’Keefe leaned over an island in the kitchen and said: “I think it seems to be hit by a car.”
“Did you ever bent over a kitchen island and said: ‘I think it seems that it was beaten by a car?” Brennan O’Keefe asked.
“I don’t remember talking to her that morning,” she replied.
Jackson did not question O’Kefe, but said the clip should not be admitted because he only shows the reading repeating “something else said.”
The clip, he added, “obviously and strategically used to try to vilify my client with something that is completely irrelevant.”
Brennan, meanwhile, said that it was not only relevant but “an extraordinarily strong consciousness of the evidence of guilt.”
