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

Flint McColgan, Boston Herald on Apr 15, 2025

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DEDHAM, Mass. — After an exhaustive 10 days of screening, a jury has been selected for Karen Read’s second trial to begin.

Selecting 18 jurors for trial took double the time Read’s first trial last year took. Court will reconvene tomorrow at 10 a.m.. Motions hearings and opening arguments are expected next Tuesday.

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 34 Fairview Road 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 made seating a jury a formidable task. Jury selection continued into the third week before reaching completion 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.

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