Karen Read jury foreman breaks silence after grueling retrial

BOSTON — Juror No. 1, the foreman in the Karen Read retrial, told The Boston Herald there was no “a-ha moment” in the grueling case that he said wasted the taxpayers’ money on paper-thin evidence that failed to bring any comfort to the victim’s family.

The unforgivable fact that investigators didn’t swarm the house at the murder scene on 34 Fairview Road in Canton during a nor’easter was “shoddy work” and a blatant “red flag,” the foreman added. That’s why the only guilty finding was drunken driving.

“If that body was on my front steps, I know my house would have been stormed,” the juror, who is Black and grew up in Jamaica Plain, said. “The texts from Trooper Proctor — ‘bitch’ and ‘(expletive)’ — also showed a serious bias, yet I had to put my personal opinion aside.

“It all seemed like a lot of wishy-washy privilege,” the foreman said. “We had to look at the evidence, and a lot of it didn’t make sense. There was no meat! No a-ha moment. No one proved there was a collision — even with all that jargon. And all the jurors agreed.”

The juror, who asked that his name not be revealed, spoke with the Herald by telephone late Friday afternoon along with his wife. The couple has three children, and they have come painfully close to crimes before. The juror said he knew Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who along with his terrorist brother Tamerlan, detonated two bombs at the finish line of the marathon in April of 2013, and bombing victim, 8-year-old Martin Richard.

Plus, his wife was working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology the night campus cop Sean Collier was executed by the Tsarnaevs, who would soon engage in a deadly firefight with police in nearby Watertown that ultimately ended in Tamerlan’s death and Dzhokhar’s capture. His wife took a train home, avoiding any trouble. The juror said he works with at-risk youth in Dorchester and met Dzhokhar and young Martin while working at a charter school in the city.

“We said ‘Of Course!’ I was then picked for the Karen Read jury,” the couple added together over the phone, sharing in the irony.

The juror said he’s still struggling with the whirlwind case and the times he’d gaze over at victim John O’Keefe’s mother, who would wipe away tears when images were shown of the Boston Police officer with his head split open. Still, he added the jury couldn’t lock up Read, the officer’s girlfriend, on the measly evidence presented.

The foreman added that the jury’s announcement of a verdict on Wednesday that was suddenly pulled back was over one male juror who had doubts.

“At lunch, I asked the juror, ‘Are you OK?’

“‘Do you think I can take back my vote?’

“Other jurors got a little nervous,” the foreman added, “but 20 minutes later he said ‘OK.’ Guilty of OUI.”

It was the only charge they agreed on and the only clear evidence — “without a doubt,” the foreman added.

“We only went with what was put in front of us,” he said of the panel, seven women and five men. “I’m still asking, ‘where is the justice for John?'”

Another juror speaking out after the verdict says she is disgusted by how much taxpayer money the Commonwealth has poured into the case and how O’Keefe’s family is still seeking justice.

Walpole resident Paula Prado said she feels “deeply” for the former BPD officer’s family.

“It is not our fault that they didn’t find who killed John O’Keefe,” Prado said in an interview with the "Howie Carr Show" on Friday. “The Commonwealth and the investigation, they couldn’t prove that it was Karen Read. For us, we had enough reasonable doubt that it wasn’t her, and we couldn’t convict her of anything.

“I really hope the O’Keefes can find who actually killed John O’Keefe,” she added, “and the DA (Michael Morrissey) reopens the case, and things keep going from there. I will be following, I will be watching closely. It broke my heart to see that family in court that day.”

All that Morrissey has said since the jury delivered the verdict on Wednesday is a four-word statement, provided to WBZ: “The jury has spoken.”

Read, 45, of Mansfield, had faced up to life in prison if convicted of second-degree murder, the top-level offense charged against her. She was also charged with manslaughter while operating a motor vehicle under the influence of liquor and leaving the scene of an accident resulting in death.

Prosecutors accused Read of backing up into O’Keefe, her boyfriend of two years, with her SUV, leaving him to freeze and die on the front yard of a Canton home where the pair was supposed to continue a night out after the bars closed, in the early snowy morning of Jan. 29, 2022.

But Prado and the jury didn’t buy the argument. In her radio interview on Friday, she said the hefty price tag that went into prosecuting Read baffled her and fellow jurors.

Prado specifically pointed out the $400,000 spent on Aperture, an accident reconstruction company that the Commonwealth pulled two witnesses from. Both testified that Read’s Lexus LX570 likely struck O’Keefe at around 12:32 a.m. on the morning of his death.

Special prosecutor Hank Brennan’s paycheck of at least $250,000 for the retrial also caught Prado’s eye.

“Every time we got on the bus, especially in the beginning, we all think, ‘How much money is the city, the state, putting on the police following us, the bus, and everything?’” Prado said. “Yeah, it bothers me a lot.”

Read’s defense countered that O’Keefe made it inside the home on Fairview Road and was killed by others inside, including possibly then-homeowner Brian Albert, who was a fellow Boston Police officer. It argued that the well-connected police family then worked with local and state police investigators to cover up the crime and frame Read.

When asked whether Prado had formed a theory about O’Keefe’s death, she responded that she does, suggesting that Read “maybe clipped him” with her SUV, based on data from Aperture.

The scratches on O’Keefe’s arm, Prado said, did not appear to come from Read’s broken taillight but rather from a dog, aligning with the defense’s theory about the Albert’s German Sheppard named “Chloe” being involved in his death.

“Something happened inside the house,” Prado said. “What is? I don’t know. … I don’t understand why the Alberts didn’t come out, and why the dog didn’t bark at all. … There were those holes we can’t fill in.”

The Alberts and key prosecution witnesses, most of whom were not called to the stand in the retrial but testified in the first trial, said they did not see O’Keefe enter the home that early morning.

Judge Beverly Cannone barred the prosecution and defense from directly referencing the federal probe into the investigation, which has since ended. Prado said she realized early on that the FBI had been involved, but it “wasn’t something that we took into consideration” during deliberations.

Prado said her thoughts about Brennan changed throughout the trial and that she “can’t judge him as a lawyer because the case was awful, full of holes.” She added that she felt Cannone, despite being “very nice,” gave too much protection to the prosecution with numerous objections during key defense witnesses.

Prado took a shot at Boston Police Officer Kelly Dever, who was a member of the Canton Police Department at the time of O’Keefe’s death.

Defense attorney Alan Jackson questioned Dever on initially telling the feds that she saw Brian Higgins and then-Canton Police Chief Kenneth Berkowitz enter the police department garage and spend a “wildly long time” with Read’s SUV.

This would give credence to the defense’s theory that police meddled with the evidence, including the busted taillight whose pieces were later found at the crime scene. Dever later recanted the statement as a “false memory” after being shown a timeline of events that proved that it wasn’t possible.

Prado called Dever not believable at all.

“It was uncomfortable to watch her behavior because she is an officer after all, and she is among us, and she carries a gun,” Prado said of Dever. “She was not reliable and scary, knowing that she’s around holding a weapon.”

Since her first interview with independent journalist Jessica Machado on Thursday, Prado has been the subject of accusations from internet trolls. She addressed them during her interview on the Howie Carr Show.

“They are all saying, ‘How come she is an attorney and she was picked for the jury? She’s a liar!” No, I am not an attorney in the US, I am an attorney in Brazil, never worked here, not licensed here,” Prado said. “And ‘How come she loves true crime, but she didn’t know about the case?’ Because all of my interests was Brazilian cases from my country. My social media account is in Portuguese.”

“I really didn’t know about the case,” she added. “I thought Turtleboy (journalist Aidan Kearney) was an environmental problem, Karen Read was just a lady.”

The stay-at-home mother to four young children called the power given to her to decide Read’s fate a “great, huge responsibility” that she was “happy to be part of it and be able to serve justice.”

“I am really happy that I am confident that Karen Read isn’t going to jail, she’s not going to pay for something she didn’t do. This filled me with joy,” Prado said, “and filled me with anger the fact that we don’t know what happened with John O’Keefe.”