Hank Brennan, a new special prosecutor for the Norfolk County District Attorney’s Office, signed a filing calling for new testing on the vehicle they allege Karen Read drove into John O’Keefe in 2022.
Prosecutors believe some data from Karen Read's SUV, which they say fatally struck her boyfriend John O'Keefe in January of 2022, may still be recovered, and they say it could help prove — or disprove — their case ahead of the retrial.
The Norfolk District Attorney's Office explained that a new expert believes that the data taken by their previous from the Lexus was incomplete, and that more data may be recoverable.
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"This evidence may be exculpatory or inculpatory," the prosecution writes in its filing, dated Thursday, signed by new special prosecutor Hank Brennan and obtained by NBC10 Boston Tuesday.
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Prosecutors requested a hearing within 14 days to get approval for the testing. NBC10 Boston is reaching out to Read's attorneys for comment.
Read the filing here:
The SUV is a key part of the case against Read — it's essentially the murder weapon, under the prosecution's case, and they spent long portions of the initial trial explaining where it was and. She is accused of ramming into O’Keefe with her SUV and leaving him for dead in a January 2022 snowstorm, while her lawyers claimed that she was framed for her boyfriend's death, and that evidence presented by the prosecution, including from the SUV, didn't add up.
The defense called as witnesses experts who did a separate crash reconstruction for a third party — revealed in a hearing away from the jury to be Massachusetts' federal prosecutors — who disagreed with the prosecution's conclusion from the evidence of how Read would have fatally injured O'Keefe. They have also suggested that pieces of the SUV's broken taillight were placed at the scene to incriminate Read.
The prosecution now says that the data initially recovered from the SUV was far less than would be expected and that the data their expert expects to be able to access would offer a more precise location of where Read's SUV was as she dropped O'Keefe off at a friend's house on Jan. 29.
"It's kind of surprising that neither side has dug as deeply into that computer and the forensics examination behind it so that you could properly instruct the jury at least to what the computer indicates that vehicle and the driver were likely doing at the time," NBC10 Boston legal analyst Michael Coyne said.
Read's two-month trial ended in July when a judge declared a mistrial, and a second trial is scheduled for Jan. 27. A "Dateline" episode on the case is due to air Friday.
Separately, prosecutors have a Wednesday deadline to formally respond to Read's request to have two counts against her, including the murder charge, dismissed, given jurors' private statements that Read would have been acquitted on them.
