Here's Why 2 Jurors Say They Acquitted Karen Read of Murdering Her Police Officer Boyfriend

Jurors in the Karen Read retrial are speaking out after her verdict, saying they acquitted her of murdering her Boston police officer boyfriend John O’Keefe because the evidence pointed to her innocence.

On Wednesday, June 18, after four days of deliberation, the jury acquitted her of second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating under the influence of alcohol, and leaving the scene of bodily injury in the death of her boyfriend, John O’Keefe, in Canton, Mass., in Jan. 2022. 

Read was found guilty of the lesser charge of operating under the influence of alcohol or liquor (OUI) and was sentenced after the verdict to one year of probation.

Read pleaded not guilty to all charges and steadfastly maintained her innocence, with her attorneys arguing that law enforcement allegedly covered up O’Keefe’s death to possibly protect one of their own.

Paula Prado, also known as juror 11, who was a lawyer in Brazil before she moved to the United States, spoke to NBC10 Boston, saying that after listening to both sides, she had no choice but to acquit Read of the most serious charges against her.

“At first for me, I thought Karen Read was actually maybe guilty of manslaughter in the beginning,” she told News 10 Boston. “But as the weeks passed by, I just realized there was too many holes that we couldn’t fill and there is nothing that put her on the scene, in our opinion, besides just dropping John O’Keefe off.”

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“And the tail light, the injuries on his arm didn’t make much sense that come from a tail light for us,” she said. 

The prosecution said that Read’s tail light shattered when they alleged she backed into O’Keefe with her SUV and drove off.

Her defense attorneys argued that her tail light was broken slightly after she backed into O’Keefe’s SUV in his driveway, which was caught on camera.

Juror 4, identified only as Jason, told TMZ Live he felt the same way about the tail light.

“It seemed to me that the videos that we could see from the car after the alleged incident happened that when we could see the tail light, it was lit up red when it shouldn’t have been red,” Jason told TMZ Live.

During the trial, the defense presented expert witnesses including Dr. Elizabeth Laposata, a former Rhode Island chief medical examiner who testified that O’Keefe’s injuries were not consistent with being hit by a vehicle, NBC10 Boston reported.

O’Keefe, she testified, died from “brain injuries and skull fractures due to blunt force trauma of the head,” she said. 

But, she continued, “By looking at the body, I could tell that there was no evidence of impact with a vehicle.”

The defense rested its case when biomechanist Andrew Rentschler from ARCCA testified that based on his review of the case, O’Keefe was not hit by a vehicle.

Based on everything Prado heard, she said, “We couldn’t prove there was a collision, and she was responsible for John’s death,” CBS News reports.

The defense had long argued that O’Keefe went inside the home of former Boston police officer Brian Albert, where he got into a possible fight with someone there who didn’t like him and died as a result.

“In my opinion he definitely went inside and something happened inside the house,” Prado said.

Now that Read has been found not guilty of killing her longtime boyfriend, Prado says she hopes authorities will seek the truth about what happened to him.

“I really, really hope there is a way for the case to be reopened and they can investigate again and find who actually did that to John,” Prado said, CBS News reports.