Life is moving on for all the key players except John O’Keefe’s family after a Massachusetts jury found his former girlfriend Karen Read not guilty of all homicide-related charges in his death outside a midnight house party during a blizzard on Jan. 29, 2022.
O’Keefe’s niece and nephew, who he took in after their parents died, are orphaned for a second time.
Read has a book deal – and a TV series about her saga in the works. But she’s also facing a wrongful death lawsuit, which requires a lesser standard of guilt to hold her liable. Her civil team filed a motion to dismiss earlier this week.
An outside investigation by the FBI found no alternate suspects and dispelled allegations of corruption leveled at local and state police. But prosecutors and investigators who led the case are facing a reckoning.
The Albert family, former owners of the property where Read and two other women found O’Keefe dead under a sheet of snow, just celebrated a wedding.
Jennifer McCabe, a key witness in both of Read’s trials and one of the women with Read that morning, is the new bride’s aunt.
At the wedding, attendees pitched in to hire private security after Read’s supporters allegedly circulated the venue online. Local police made their presence known, too. A marked SUV was parked at the foot of the church steps.
Kerry Roberts, a friend of O’Keefe’s who was also present with McCabe and Read when they found his body, told Fox News Digital she is among the witnesses facing an ongoing harassment campaign, along with the Alberts, the McCabes and O’Keefe’s immediate family.
“I don’t know why they’re making Jen McCabe a villain,” she said in a phone interview. “All she did was answer the same phone call I did. Karen called her. She didn’t call Karen. It’s so stupid and bizarre.”
The victim’s mother, Peggy O’Keefe, is dealing with harassment of her own, including a woman seen dancing on video at the foot of her driveway after Read’s acquittal.
Roberts said the Norfolk District Attorney’s Office told her to stop contacting their witness advocate after the trial, even as strangers continue to throw things at her house, call her family “murderers” in the supermarket and mock her children.
“We put our a–es on the line for three and a half years, two trials, to help the state of Massachusetts, and you’re not going to help us when we’re being harassed?” she said. “It’s not worth it to put my family through ever again, and not be protected at all. It’s sick. It’s absolutely sick.”
There’s an ongoing witness intimidation case against Aidan Kearney, a Canton blogger who goes by the name Turtleboy, but while Roberts is not one of his alleged victims, she says she faces rude comments and other harassment from random members of the community.
After baseball games, kids on the team opposing her son might tell him “Free Karen Read” while lining up to shake hands, she said. She filed a complaint against her mailman, who allegedly muttered a vulgarity into her doorbell camera when he saw a “Justice for John O’Keefe” sign at her house. Now someone else delivers her letters.
Want to learn more about Karen Read’s murder trial? Click down below
“My message to people is don’t ever be a witness,” she said. “If this happens to you, you’re not gonna be protected at all.”
Read’s lead defense lawyer Alan Jackson returned to Los Angeles in time for the Fourth of July holiday, where he was seen cruising in a Shelby Cobra replica – powered by a 351 Stroker he described as “a fire-breathing dragon.”
“[It’s] taking a while to come down,” he told Fox News Digital. “But I’m slowly getting back into my rhythm.”
He already has another deadly crash case lined up – the defense of Fraser Bohm, a 22-year-old from Malibu facing four counts of murder in a high-speed wreck that killed four sorority girls from Pepperdine University in October 2023.
Bohm is due back in court next month after Jackson asked for more time to prep a defense for his new client.
Michael Proctor, a former homicide detective with the Massachusetts State Police, lost his job but may still resurface in the upcoming murder trial of Brian Walshe – who is accused of killing his wife Ana outside Boston.
Her remains have not been found. Proctor worked that case, too, and Walshe’s lawyers have argued his presence tainted the investigation. That trial is scheduled to kick off in October.
State police fired Proctor after he sent lewd texts about Read to his friends – officially faulting him for sharing law enforcement sensitive information with civilians – and for drinking on the job.
His former supervisor, Yuri Bukhenik, was also reassigned in the wake of Read’s second trial out of the homicide unit in Norfolk County and to an administrative post in Boston, according to Boston 25.
Read’s defense alleged a cover-up by state and local police, alternately insinuating they got lazy in the investigation and failed to do a thorough job or outright framed her.
Hank Brennan, the high-powered defense attorney hired as a special prosecutor to lead Read’s second trial, reportedly raked in more than $550,000 for his work, according to the Boston Herald.
That’s a reasonable sum for a private lawyer, said retired Massachusetts judge and Boston College law professor Jack Lu, but also much more than a deputy district attorney on the state payroll would have made: “Probably $130,000 annually.”
Brennan put in long days and likely worked through weekends, while keeping his private practice open at the same time, he added.
And while in a rare public statement he slammed the prevalence of witness intimidation and apologized for not securing a conviction, O’Keefe’s supporters indicated they appreciate his work on the case.
“The jury pool was completely tainted is all I can say,” Roberts told Fox News Digital. “Hank did so much work. He was a genius. He really was. Nobody could’ve gotten it done. Which is wicked sad.”
