Karen Read murder trial: Jury selection continues a 10th day

Flint McColgan, Boston Herald on Apr 15, 2025

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DEDHAM, Mass. — The exhaustive task of seating a jury for the Karen Read trial has reached its 10th day, with the vast majority of potential jurors indicating they had discussed the case and a large percentage had formed an opinion.

Read, 45, of Mansfield, is accused of striking Boston police Officer John O’Keefe, 46, her boyfriend of about two years, with her SUV and leaving him to die in a major snowstorm on the front lawn of a home in Canton on Jan. 29, 2022.

She was tried last year on charges of second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating a motor vehicle under the influence, and leaving the scene of an accident causing death, but that ended in a mistrial on July 1, 2024, after the jury reported an impasse through three notes.

Even ahead of the first trial, the case had become a regional firestorm for both lovers of true crime and those moved by defense allegations of major public official and police corruption. Now, as it moves toward opening statements in the retrial, its national prominence has grown even further.

Much of the public interest has been fueled by public comments from the defendant herself, who has done various magazine interviews and even gave extreme access to herself and her legal team for the documentary “A Body in the Snow: The Trial of Karen Read,” which aired last month on the network Investigation Discovery — known as ID — and streamed on (HBO) MAX.

The prosecution has seized on Read’s public comments and on Tuesday filed a notice that it “intends to introduce recorded statements in its opening statement.”

That revelation came as part of an overall motion stating prosecutors will produce a copy of the recorded statements to the court ahead of time “for a ruling on admissibility,” and that those will be marked for the record. The motion requests that the court order the defense to do the same for its opening statement.

Jury selection continues

The case’s popularity has made seating a jury a formidable task. Jury selection is now in its third week, even though the results Friday, in which attorneys had selected their goal of 16 jurors for trial, promised that the trial would begin in earnest soon. But the effort continues.

Parties reconvened Monday to try to bolster the jury pool but ended the day with the same number after one dismissal and a new seating. The quest for additional jurors continues Tuesday, when 54 additional potential jurors were brought into Norfolk Superior Court.

Of those, 43 indicated during general questioning that they had at least heard of or discussed the case. Another subset of 26 potential jurors indicated they had formed an opinion, and eight of them indicated they had established a bias in the case that would make objectivity difficult.

Six of them said they had a philosophical reason to not be seated as a juror and 25 said it would be a hardship to serve. The window for hardship is quite broad in this case: Judge Beverly J. Cannone says the actual trial could take as long as eight weeks.

Potential jurors have already filled out their questionnaires and attorneys have reviewed them. Attorneys are now questioning certain potential jurors.

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