Karen Read‘s second trial in connection with the death of her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O’Keefe, continues on Friday in Dedham’s Norfolk Superior Court before Judge Beverly Cannone.
Prosecutors rested their case on Thursday, and the defense called its first witness on Friday.
Follow along with live updates from Friday’s testimony below:
People to know:
Hank Brennan, special prosecutor for the Norfolk district attorney’s officeMatthew DiSogra, vehicle data expert and accident reconstructionist at Delta VAlan Jackson, lawyer for Read
2:16 p.m. – DiSogra pressed on clock variance calculations
Brennan resumed his cross-examination by drilling down on DiSogra’s finding that three seconds needed to be added to the timestamps pulled from Read’s SUV. That variance is supported by the finding of prosecution experts that the ignition powers on three seconds before the car’s infotainment system.
“When you are suggesting 3 seconds should be added to the time, do you think maybe you made a mistake in considering it that way?” Brennan asked.
DiSogra said that wasn’t correct and the time the ignition powered on would match the time the car clock began running.
Brennan moved on to DiSogra’s calculations that accounted for the variance between Read’s SUV clock and O’Keefe’s phone using phone calls. Those calls were registered in the infotainment system in the car when Read powered the car on around 5 a.m. on Jan. 29, 2022.
The prosecution’s expert said the variance between the calls in the car and on O’Keefe’s phone was actually the difference between her phone and his.
Brennan suggested all DiSogra’s conclusions and opinions are “based on an assumption you don’t even know the predicate for.”
DiSogra admitted “some of the possibilities” could be wrong if that variance was not showing the difference between the phone and the car. He contended that an initial report from a prosecution expert presented those times as infotainment and iPhone times, so he stands by the original analysis.
But if that were incorrect, “certain lines would go away,” DiSogra said, acknowledging it would “change the total number of possibilities.” Of the 30 possibilities he testified to, four would be eliminated, he said.
12:53 p.m. – Jury sent out for lunch
After a sidebar, Cannone dismissed the jury for an hour-long lunch break.
Before the break, Brennan began questioning DiSogra about the conclusions of another prosecution expert, Judson Welcher. But Jackson objected.
DiSogra explained that while the methods used by Weclher and Shanon Burgess were “not typical,” he adopted their methodology for the basis of his analysis.
He conceded that there was no “legitimate professional basis” for suggesting his methodology was better or worse in some way.
12:04 p.m. – Pedestrian strike ‘generally wouldn’t’ register in SUV data
Brennan began his cross-examination by asking DiSogra if he was “trying to offer an opinion” that Read’s SUV “never hit” John O’Keefe. He said he wasn’t, and that he wasn’t offering an opinion the car never got in a collision.
DiSogra conceded the data from Read’s Lexus doesn’t mean it never got into a collision, only that one was never recorded. He noted that a collision would not register as a trigger event in the car.
Brennan suggested Read accelerating her SUV would have caused the trigger event. A pedestrian strike “generally wouldn’t” meet the threshold to register in the vehicle’s Event Data Recorder, DiSogra said.
He moved to a line of questioning about whether DiSogra did any “actual testing” in this case. DiSogra said his role was to interpret the data.
“The extent of my work [in this case] is just basic addition, just adding numbers together that already existed in the Aperture reports,” he said.
Much of Brennan’s cross-examination focused on the data recovered by Shanon Burgess, an expert at Aperture, from Read’s SUV. Brennan noted that DiSogra first concluded there was no reason to conduct further testing on the chips in the car other than to confirm how much data was on them.
But Burgess found an SD card that contained more data. DiSogra said he was “confused” by the process Burgess undertook because he deviated from a written protocol he had submitted.
11:11 a.m. – Data from Lexus SUV does not support collision
DiSogra said he identified 30 different possibilities for the time when the SUV techstream event in Read’s Lexus happened relative to when O’Keefe’s phone locked for the final time.
Of those 30, 25 possible times showed the phone locking after the end of the “backing maneuver” event. Two times show the events happening simultaneous to one another and three show the phone locking before the end of the event.
DiSogra said he had no opinion on which possibility was most likely.
The module inside Read’s SUV that would have recorded a collision did not log one on Jan. 29, 2022, he said. Jackson began asking DiSogra about other techstream events on the SUV, but Brennan objected to the entire line of questioning and Cannone called the lawyers to sidebar.
Before the “backing maneuver” event, DiSogra identified 19 trigger events in Read’s SUV. None of those events supported a collision, he said.
Jackson concluded his questions there and Cannone sent jurors out for a recess.
10:41 a.m. – DiSogra explains findings
The analysis from Aperture, a firm hired by prosecutors, found the techstream event in Read’s Lexus stopped recording data at 12:31:43 a.m. and the phone locked at 12:32:09 a.m., 26 seconds later.
In an original report, Shanon Burgess, who works at Aperture, noted several adjustments to the clocks, including a three-second difference between when the vehicle ignition started and when its infotainment system booted up.
DiSogra said it was not clear if that delay was consistent across all Lexus SUVs or just the exemplar used by Aperture. He explained he conducted his analysis with and without the three-second adjustment. Burgess did not use the adjustment, he said.
Using that adjustment, there would be 34 seconds between the trigger event in the SUV and O’Keefe’s phone locking.
In Burgess’ first analysis, he compared calls logged on O’Keefe’s phone to those logged in the Lexus’ system. Doing so, he found a two-second difference between the two clocks. Using that adjustment, the phone lock still happens after the SUV event.
In another analysis, Burgess aligned the clocks using a three-point turn event logged by Read’s SUV. Even using that adjustment, the phone is locked six seconds after the “backing maneuver” SUV event.
Based on Apeture’s January report, “regardless of what adjustment you make, the phone lock always occurs after the end of the [techstream] event,” DiSogra said.
But in a May report, Burgess uses a range of times, finding the time of the three-point turn event can’t be nailed down specifically. As a result, DiSogra said “we end up with nine possible values,” spanning from five seconds after the techstram event to three seconds before it.
DiSogra said both reports were valid analyses but should be taken together. No specific time was more likely than another, he said.
10:07 a.m. – Defense expert details Lexus SUV ‘trigger event’
The first witness called by Read’s defense, Matthew DiSogra, is the director of engineering for the Event Data Recorder lab at Delta V. He has been involved in more than 1,000 cases involving clock alignments, including Read’s.
DiSogra said he reviewed data gathered by a pair of prosecution experts, who work for the firm Aperture LLC. He analyzed the methods used by Shanon Burgess, a prosecution expert, to align the clocks in Read’s Lexus and O’Keefe’s iPhone.
Burgess testified that the clocks were off by 21 to 29 seconds.
DiSogra explained that vehicles record a trigger as a singular point of time and a “techstream event” documents the five seconds before the event happens and then an additional five seconds following the trigger.
Prosecutors have said a trigger event at 12:31:38 a.m. represents when Read began a “backing maneuver” that struck O’Keefe. That event ended at 12:31:43 a.m., according to Burgess’ testimony. O’Keefe’s phone locked at 12:32:09 a.m.
DiSogra explained five seconds needed to be subtracted from any conclusions about the timing of the trigger event.
“Based on all of the data in those two original reports, regardless of what adjustment is made, the phone lock event always occurs after the end of the event,” DiSogra said.
9:38 a.m. – Lawyers argue motion for ‘required finding’ of not guilty
Following the sidebar, Alan Jackson, a lawyer for Read, argued the defense’s motion for a required finding of not guilty. That motion is commonly filed in criminal cases after the prosecution requests its case.
Jackson said simply, “the commonwealth has not proven that there was a collision on Jan. 29, 2022 at 34 Fairview Road.”
There were no eyewitnesses, video evidence or audio evidence presented to support the prosecution’s claim of a collision, he said.
Prosecutors, through “suspect experts,” sought to prove only a “backing event,” Jackson said, and did not prove there was a collision associated with that event.
They didn’t “prove a collision at a particular time or place,” he told Cannone.
Jackson argued the prosecution’s case on the charges of second-degree murder and leaving the scene of an accident causing injury or death “fails miserably.”
The government “presented their best case and their case has failed,” he said. “No reasonable jury could find Karen Read guilty of count one, two or three.”
“This was a vindictive prosecution,” he concluded.
But in his argument, special prosecutor Hank Brennan said the “evidence of a collision is abundant,” pointing to taillight fragments from Read’s Lexus found in O’Keefe’s clothes.
Brennan also pointed to the injuries on O’Keefe’s arm that he said were “consistent with” the damage to her taillight.
“Any reasonable person could find her conduct created a plain and strong likelihood of death,” he said.
Cannone denied the motion as to all three counts and stepped off the bench. When the trial returns, jurors will hear from the first witness called by the defense.
9:12 a.m. – Judge calls lawyers to sidebar
When the trial resumed, Cannone called the lawyers to sidebar for a conversation out of earshot of those in the courtroom or watching the live stream.
Prosecutors filed a motion Thursday to preclude the defense from calling four people who were on a group text with former Massachusetts State Police Trooper Michael Proctor. The four were added to the defense’s witness list earlier this week. All were in a group conversation with Proctor, where he sent degrading text messages about Read that led to his firing.
Read, 45, is charged with second-degree murder in the death of O’Keefe, who was found outside the home of a fellow Boston police officer on Jan. 29, 2022.
Norfolk County prosecutors say Read struck O’Keefe with her SUV while driving intoxicated. Read’s attorneys say her car never struck O’Keefe and that others are to blame for his death.
