‘I f***ing hate you!’: Prosecution plays voicemails Karen Read left for John O'Keefe the morning he died (2024)

Crime

Jurors on Thursday also learned the extent of O’Keefe’s head injuries and the reason his manner of death was listed as “undetermined.”

By Abby Patkin

updated on June 20, 2024

On the stand Thursday:

• Dr. Irini Scordi-Bello, Office of the Chief Medical Examiner
• Dr. Renee Stonebridge, Office of the Chief Medical Examiner
• Trooper Nicholas Guarino, Massachusetts State Police

4:20 p.m. update: John O’Keefe had no major signs of a physical fight, medical examiner testifies

John O’Keefe’s official cause of death was “blunt impact injuries of head and hypothermia,” according to Dr. Irini Scordi-Bello, a medical examiner in the state Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

Scordi-Bello, who performed O’Keefe’s autopsy, testified that she could not determine a manner of death.

“The manner of death has to do with the circ*mstances under which Mr. O’Keefe sustained those injuries, and I did not have enough information to be able to determine whether those injuries were accidental or not,” she explained.

Scordi-Bello testified that the majority of O’Keefe’s blunt force injuries were to his face and head, as well as his arm. Among O’Keefe’s various injuries, she described bleeding on both of his eyelids, swelling of his eyes, a small cut on his right eyelid, superficial scratches on the left side of his nose, a laceration on the back of his head, scrapes of various sizes along his right arm, bruising on the back of his right hand, a faint scratch on the back of his left hand, and a small abrasion on the side of his right knee.

O’Keefe also had brain hemorrhages and fractures on the front and back of his skull, Scordi-Bello said. She said the cut on the back of O’Keefe’s head was overlying the area of the skull from which the fractures appeared to radiate.

His internal organs also indicated possible signs of hypothermia, including small areas of bleeding in his stomach lining and some diffuse hemorrhage of his pancreas and the surrounding tissues, according to Scordi-Bello.

She testified that O’Keefe, who had been out drinking at two local bars the night before he died, had alcohol in his system at a level of 0.21 grams per deciliter in his blood and 0.28 grams per deciliter in his vitreous humor — fluid drawn from behind the eyes.

“That suggests that the level in Mr. O’Keefe’s blood had been higher than .21, and that’s reflected by the .28 that was in the vitreous,” Scordi-Bello explained. “The vitreous metabolism of alcohol lags … behind that of the blood and the circulation.”

Assistant District Attorney Adam Lally asked about the relationship between O’Keefe’s intoxication and the onset of his hypothermia.

“Alcohol intoxication has been shown to inhibit some of the mechanisms that the body uses to maintain heat,” Scordi-Bello said. “So it’s definitely a factor that is a negative factor when it comes to hypothermia.”

She later walked jurors through O’Keefe’s skull and brain injuries.

In O’Keefe’s case, “We know that the head impacted something blunt with enough force to break the skull, and enough force for those fractures to propagate or radiate into the middle cranial fossa and also the anterior cranial fossa, which is the front chambers of the base,” she explained.

When those bones are fractured, blood can seep into the soft tissues and show up as bleeding, hemorrhaging, or bruising around the eyes, Scordi-Bello said. She noted it is a “well-known fact” that fractures to the base of the skull can result in a bruising response known as “raccoon eyes.”

“Any time the brain is injured, it responds by swelling,” Scordi-Bello continued. “And the skull is a closed space without the ability to expand. … In the skull, once the brain starts to react to the injury and it starts to swell, there is nowhere to go except for down.”

In other words, the area around the brainstem and spinal cord.

Given the skull is “a pretty thick bone” that requires considerable force to break, she suggested O’Keefe suffered “a pretty considerable impact.” Scordi-Bello also opined that O’Keefe sustained his blunt force injuries before hypothermia set in.

“These are not injuries that are immediately lethal,” she noted. “This is not something that would cause death in seconds, and therefore Mr. O’Keefe may have been incapacitated by the injuries or knocked out, if you will, and was not able to get himself into a warmer environment and therefore hypothermia set in, given the environmental conditions and given the clothing on the body. Or the lack of clothing, I should say — no big jacket or anything like that.”

Lally asked if Scordi-Bello observed anything that would indicate a fight or altercation. She said she saw no major signs of “what I would call a significant altercation.” While O’Keefe had some contusions on his hands, she noted the bruising on one hand was possibly from attempts to insert an IV.

Further, O’Keefe had no bruising on his knuckles and no fractures in his hands, Scordi-Bello said. He did have two fractured ribs near his sternum, though she said that was a common location for fractures associated with CPR.

Scordi-Bello will continue her testimony Friday. As she dismissed jurors for the day, Judge Beverly Cannone said the trial is on track to wrap up sometime next week.

2:30 p.m. update: John O’Keefe’s brain injuries could be consistent with a fall or vehicle strike, expert from the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office says

John O’Keefe’s brain showed multiple hemorrhages and contusions — acute injuries “due to some type of trauma,” according to Dr. Renee Stonebridge, a medical examiner and director of cardiac and neuropathology at the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office.

O’Keefe’s traumatic injuries resulted from “something that required some type of force, given that there were skull fractures,” Stonebridge explained. She confirmed her findings could be consistent with a fall or being struck by a vehicle and falling to the ground.

Stonebridge recalled seeing a subarachnoid hemorrhage in O’Keefe’s brain.

“If you have a subarachnoid hemorrhage, most of the time, the causes are either a ruptured aneurysm — which is something I would see upon cutting the brain — or some type of trauma,” she explained.

O’Keefe also had herniation and “hemorrhage within the brain stem,” as well as multiple small contusions — bruises, essentially — in the front of his brain, according to Stonebridge.

The defense decided to forgo cross-examination.

2:05 p.m. update: ‘I f***ing hate you!’ Read told O’Keefe in a voicemail the morning he died

In fiery voicemail messages left on John O’Keefe’s phone the morning he died, Karen Read called her boyfriend of two years a “f***ing pervert,” told him she hated him, and accused him of sleeping with “another girl.”

According to Massachusetts State Police Trooper Nicholas Guarino, who analyzed data from the couple’s cellphones, Read called O’Keefe more than 50 times and left him eight voicemails the morning of Jan. 29, 2022. He said there was no indication O’Keefe ever picked up the phone and spoke with Read. The eight voicemails were played in the courtroom Thursday.

“John, I f***ing hate you!” Read screamed in the first message, at 12:37 a.m.

At 12:59 a.m., she said, “John, I’m here with your f***ing kids. Nobody knows where the f*** you are, you f***ing pervert.”

She called O’Keefe a pervert again in another message at 1:11 a.m. Seven minutes later, she said she was going home, called O’Keefe a “f***ing loser,” and accused him of “using me right now” and “f***ing another girl.”

But Read’s voicemails took a turn later in the morning. In a call at 5:23 a.m., she sounded frantic as she screamed something unintelligible. Another voicemail was left on O’Keefe’s phone at 6:08 a.m. — after Read, Jennifer McCabe, and Kerry Roberts found his body outside 34 Fairview Road. In the message, McCabe can be heard on the phone with 911 while a distraught Read screams in the background.

Read also called her parents around 1:10 a.m. on Jan. 29, then again at 4:40 a.m. and 4:42 a.m., Guarino said. They answered the third call.

On the stand, Guarino read aloud several messages Read exchanged later that morning with O’Keefe’s longtime friend, Laura Sullivan. At 12:45 p.m. on the 29th, Sullivan texted Read asking her to “please call me.” Below are some of their messages, as they were shown to jurors.

“Hi Laura,” Read replied. “John passed away.”

“Karen I’m shaking I’m so sorry,” Sullivan wrote.

“We found him outside in the snow at 5am,” Read wrote.

When Sullivan asked why O’Keefe was out in the snow, Read replied, “He left a party we were at. I don’t know what time. I didn’t even go in. I went to bed.”

“Oh my god,” Sullivan wrote back. “Karen my heart breaks for everyone.”

What did O’Keefe’s GPS data show?

Guarino testified that he was unable to obtain GPS coordinates from Read’s phone, leading him to believe the device’s location services might have been turned off at the time. He said Read’s phone auto-connected to the Wi-Fi at O’Keefe’s house at 12:36 a.m. on the 29th.

Data from O’Keefe’s phone, meanwhile, tracked his journey from the Waterfall Bar & Grill to 34 Fairview Road. Guarino said the data also showed O’Keefe taking several steps and even climbing up or down three flights of stairs around 12:22 a.m., though he noted Waze data indicated O’Keefe was still traveling in Read’s car at the time.

The defense has argued O’Keefe’s Apple Health data actually indicates he was moving around inside 34 Fairview Road. However, Guarino said the data can be misleading. “If you’re moving it around, it’s going to think you’re taking steps when you might not actually be walking,” he explained.

He said O’Keefe’s phone data showed his arrival in the area of 34 Fairview Road at 12:24 a.m. The phone registered “no real speed” between 12:25 a.m. and 6:15 a.m., when the device was found with O’Keefe’s body, Guarino said.

He explained that location data accuracy can fluctuate due to weather and landscape, noting that the area around 34 Fairview Road is hilly. Guarino further testified that he knows from personal experience the cellphone signal on Fairview Road is “not great.”

Guarino and Trooper Michael Proctor went back to 34 Fairview Road on May 8, 2023, to gauge the distance from the spot where O’Keefe’s body was found to the home’s front door — a span of about 72 feet, he said.

For a few seconds at 12:25 a.m., the location range for O’Keefe’s phone fluctuated to encompass a larger radius that included the house at 34 Fairview Road, he noted. The circle then shrank to include only the front yard. Given where O’Keefe and his cellphone ended up, he would have had to move at about 32 mph to get to the front door and back in just a few seconds, Guarino explained.

The data also indicated the phone remained in the same spot for the rest of the night, he said.

Read allegedly Googled ‘DUI attorneys’

Prosecutors sought to introduce a Google search Read allegedly made for “DUI attorneys” at 1:27 p.m. on Jan. 29, 2022 — before her interview with State Police troopers. Assistant District Attorney Laura McLaughlin argued the search undermines Read’s defense that she “was framed, that she had no intent or opportunity to commit these crimes. Further, that she was not intoxicated at the time.”

Defense attorney David Yannetti said Proctor, the lead investigator, had called Read about eight minutes before Read made the search. He argued Read was only looking for an attorney to defend her presumptive innocence.

Judge Beverly Cannone said she would not allow the search into evidence at this time, though she left the door open for its inclusion later on in the trial.

Yannetti grills Guarino on phone data, timestamps

On cross-examination, defense attorney David Yannetti asked Guarino if it’s important to include “all the important details” in a police report.

“It depends on the report that I’m writing. There’s some data that goes in, there’s some that doesn’t. I can’t have everything in,” Guarino replied, adding, “If I did a handwritten report for everything, they’d be thousands of pages for the amount of data in these devices.”

Yannetti read from Guarino’s February 2022 report that said Proctor secured O’Keefe’s phone “while on scene.” Guarino testified that he didn’t know at the time where O’Keefe’s cellphone was recovered and clarified that he later learned the phone was retrieved from the Canton Police Department.

Yannetti also noted Guarino didn’t report on O’Keefe’s location or Apple Health data until the spring of 2023. Guarino said he extracted the phone’s data and turned it over to Proctor to parse earlier in the investigation but didn’t look through the data himself until later on.

Citing the timestamps on the voicemails Read left O’Keefe, Yannetti noted that “no one at 34 Fairview — including Jennifer McCabe — could have witnessed Karen Read outside that residence at 12:45 a.m.” McCabe and her husband both testified that they saw a dark SUV matching Read’s car pull up outside the house, and Trooper Joseph Paul, a State Police crash analyst, said he believes Read struck O’Keefe at about 12:45 a.m. on the 29th.

Yannetti also questioned Guarino about the timeline for O’Keefe’s Apple Health data.

“Are you aware that an app on an iPhone may pull data by choosing from three different clocks when it timestamps location data?” Yannetti asked. Guarino said he was aware. He also confirmed the three clocks can vary in time.

Yannetti handed Guarino a printout of O’Keefe’s phone data, showing a three-minute difference between the clocks. However, Guarino denied that the difference could account for the discrepancy between O’Keefe’s Waze location and the steps logged in his Apple Health data. He further noted that Yannetti had shown him data from the phone’s power log, which “had nothing to do with the GPS.” Answering a later question from Assistant District Attorney Adam Lally, Guarino explained that the power log only tracks battery levels.

Yannetti pointed out that Guarino’s April 2023 report was also the first time he disclosed McCabe’s hypothermia-related Google searches. Guarino said he “never looked” at McCabe’s phone and explained that he only found the disputed searches in a write-ahead log after running her extracted phone data through an updated version of the Cellebrite software.

According to Yannetti, Guarino’s April 2023 report also mentioned two deleted calls to McCabe’s sister Nicole Albert, who was saved as “Coco” in her phone. The calls were at 6:07 a.m. and 6:08 a.m., respectively, and lasted mere seconds.

“There’s a reason why” both calls were listed as deleted, Guarino said. Answering a later question from Lally, Guarino said he didn’t believe the deletions were user initiated, but “phone-initiated.”

He also testified that Read didn’t make any Google searches between midnight and 5 a.m. on the 29th, though she had “a few” deleted searches from that afternoon. He said he saw no deleted calls on her phone that day.

9:25 a.m. update: Jury will hear from defense expert who believes John O’Keefe was injured in a dog attack

Jurors will hear testimony from a retired physician and forensic pathologist who believes John O’Keefe was injured in a dog attack, Judge Beverly Cannone ruled Thursday.

Defense expert Dr. Marie Russell faced voir dire questioning without the jury present Tuesday, after prosecutors complained they were only made aware of Russell’s expected testimony in late May. The abrasions on O’Keefe’s right arm “are consistent with a large dog attack,” Russell opined. “There’s a combination of both what I consider bite wounds and scratch wounds on the arm.”

Russell, who also has a background as a police officer in Malden, has authored or co-authored several peer-reviewed articles on law enforcement dog bites.

“I’m satisfied that the voir dire provided the commonwealth the information that the defense should have provided the commonwealth,” Cannone said before testimony in Read’s trial got underway Thursday.

Cannone did, however, limit the scope of what Russell will be permitted to say on the stand.

“She’ll be allowed only to opine whether or not the marks on John O’Keefe’s arm were the result of an animal attack,” Cannone said. “But she can’t testify as an expert on police activity. There will be none of that. And she will not be able to testify as to what the injuries are inconsistent with.”

The judge also weighed in on expected testimony from two crash reconstructionists hired as part of a federal probe into the state’s handling of Read’s case. Cannone said Daniel Wolfe, director of accident reconstruction at ARCCA Inc., will be allowed to testify as to his involvement in a report on the case. However, she said she had “some concerns” about anticipated testimony from Andrew Rentschler, vice president and director of biomechanics for ARCCA’s Midwest division.

“It’s clear to me that in Massachusetts, biomechanical engineers are not qualified to testify as to medical causation of an injury. Only an MD can do that,” Cannone told Read’s lawyers. “So I’m going to reserve ruling on the rest of his testimony. There are certain things he can testify, and I’ll hear you again before he testifies next week.”

Livestream via NBC10 Boston.

After two days off from the Karen Read murder trial, jurors are back in court Thursday for additional witness testimony.

Although court was in session Tuesday, the jury was absent while lawyers conducted preliminary questioning of three defense witnesses. The trial also took a break Wednesday for the Juneteenth holiday.

Massachusetts State Police Trooper Nicholas Guarino is expected back on the stand for additional testimony. On Monday, Guarino testified about analyzing digital data from sources including cellphones belonging to Read, John O’Keefe, and witness Jennifer McCabe. He also read aloud a series of heated messages Read and O’Keefe exchanged in the hours leading up to O’Keefe’s death on Jan. 29, 2022.

Read, 44, of Mansfield, is accused of backing her Lexus SUV into O’Keefe — a Boston police officer and her boyfriend of two years — after a night of bar hopping. Prosecutors allege Read drunkenly and intentionally struck O’Keefe while dropping him off at an afterparty in Canton, then left him to die in the snow.

Yet Read’s lawyers say she’s being framed and that O’Keefe’s injuries were actually the result of a beating he received after walking into 34 Fairview Road. They’ve also suggested O’Keefe could have been attacked by the homeowner’s dog, a German shepherd mix named “Chloe.”

During voir dire questioning Tuesday, defense expert Dr. Marie Russell, a retired emergency physician and forensic pathologist, said she believes the abrasions on O’Keefe’s right arm were the result of animal bites or scratches.

“They are consistent with a large dog attack,” Russell said. “There’s a combination of both what I consider bite wounds and scratch wounds on the arm.”

Teri Kun, a forensic scientist with the University of California, Davis Veterinary Genetics Laboratory Forensic Unit, previously testified that swabs taken from O’Keefe’s shirt turned up no signs of canine DNA. Judge Beverly Cannone has yet to say whether Russell will be allowed to testify, after prosecutors complained they only received notice of Russell’s expected testimony in late May.

Prosecutors also raised concerns about expected testimony from two crash reconstructionists hired as part of a federal investigation into the state’s handling of Read’s case. Daniel Wolfe, director of accident reconstruction at ARCCA Inc., confirmed the private company received select information about the case from the Department of Justice and the FBI.

Andrew Rentschler, vice president and director of biomechanics for ARCCA’s Midwest division, said he was specifically tasked with seeing if it was possible to determine how O’Keefe’s injuries occurred. Part of that, he said, “was to determine whether the injuries — the head injury and the arm injuries — resulted from contact with the Lexus in this case.”

The prosecution and defense went head to head over one specific finding from ARCCA’s report, which purportedly read, “There is currently insufficient evidence to determine the cause of Mr. O’Keefe’s skull and brain injuries or the circ*mstances surrounding the event.”

Assistant District Attorney Adam Lally questioned whether Rentschler or Wolfe would be qualified to testify to that conclusion. “That’s more of an area of forensic pathology,” he argued.

Defense attorney Alan Jackson argued the finding was fair game, adding, “That is well within the scope of their expertise, obviously.”