A juror in the high-profile Karen Read trial believes “something happened inside the house” to Boston cop John O’Keefe after his financial analyst girlfriend dropped him off — hours before he was found dead.
Paula Prado, one of the 12 jurors in the closely watched murder trial, spoke out Thursday about the panel’s decision to find Read, 45, not guilty of murder and manslaughter charges even though she conceded Read could have possibly “touched him somehow” with her SUV outside the Canton house.
“Either he got out of her way or something, and maybe he lost his shoes in the process,” Prado said, according to WBZ News in reference to O’Keefe only having a shoe on when he was found the morning of Jan. 29, 2022.
“But in my opinion, he definitely went inside and something happened inside the house.”
While prosecutors accused Read of hitting O’Keefe, 46, with her car and leaving him for dead in a snowbank, the defense claimed the former adjunct professor was the lackey of a police cover-up and the police officer was beaten up at the party and even bitten by a dog.
Prado, who is a lawyer from Brazil, said initially she thought Read might be guilty of manslaughter, but that assumption quickly eroded.
“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,” she told WBZ.
She also said it didn’t “make much sense” that the injuries on O’Keefe’s arm were caused by the taillight on Read’s SUV.
“We couldn’t prove there was a collision, and she was responsible for John’s death,” Prado adding she is “100% convinced.”
Prado also found it confounding Brian Higgins, an agent of the Bureau, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, who exchanged flirty texts with Read two weeks before O’Keefe’s death, and Brian Albert, the homeowner at the time O’Keefe was found outside, didn’t take the stand.
“The owner for the house and the person who had sent text messages with Karen Read a few days before John O’Keefe’s death … I think it was weird not to hear from them,” Prado said.
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