Karen Read case investigator, prosecutor could appear on stand Monday

Flint McColgan, Boston Herald on Jul 20, 2025

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Two prominent figures from the murder trials of Karen Read could crop up again in the same courtroom on Monday.

Both original Read prosecutor Adam Lally and lead investigator Michael Proctor — who was fired by the Massachusetts State Police earlier this year due primarily to his conduct into that investigation — could end up on the witness stand Monday for a Milton murder case.

Possible fireworks could come in the hearing scheduled for 9 a.m. Monday in Courtroom 25 of the Norfolk Superior Court.

That’s the courtroom where Lally twice prosecuted Mansfield’s Read for the murder of her boyfriend, Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, and Proctor read aloud from the witness stand the text messages that contributed in no small part to his dishonorable discharge from the force earlier this year.

This time it’s for an evidentiary hearing to dismiss the murder case of Myles Omari King, a case partially investigated by Proctor and originally prosecuted by Lally.

A jury last month acquitted Read of all charges other than drunken driving.

Bail and dismissal request

Defense attorney Rosemary Scapicchio has already won a new bail order for her client based, according to her request, on a huge amount of new evidence that she has to process before trial.

At the time of her May 28th request to have the case dismissed outright, Scapicchio says her client had been held without bail for three years, 10 months and 17 days.

“The Commonwealth waited until the five months before trial to turn over crucial and voluminous evidence to the defense. Counsel is in the process of reviewing 6 search warrants and affidavits not previously provided,” her motion stated.

“The Commonwealth’s failure to perform an adequate investigation and turn over relevant and exculpatory discovery should fall on their shoulders, not beleaguer King,” she wrote in the filing.

She continued: “… This Court should send a message to the Norfolk County District Attorney’s office that their lax policy and repeated failure to comply with orders of this Court and with the due process rights of defendants warrant dismissal in this case.”

Judge Michael P. Doolin last month considered a joint request to set a low bail in King’s case and to continue the trial from its scheduled start in September. He agreed to both requests, though he set bail at $10,000 cash with home confinement and GPS monitoring, not the $2,500 requested. There is no new trial date.

Proctor’s records

Proctor was fired by the MSP earlier this year for what Judge Doolin summarizes as allegedly sending “inappropriate and misogynistic messages on his personal cell phone suggesting that he was biased against (Read).”

Now defense attorneys, including Scapicchio, think that a deeper dive into Proctor’s phone records might reveal his bias against their own clients. The matter led to a chaotic hearing in court on Friday in which the attorneys argued against the impending destruction of the contents of Proctor’s iCloud account.

In this case, Scapicchio sought records related to Proctor’s phones — both work and personal — and she was largely successful in her request. Doolin granted her access to records for both phones from the date of the charged murder, July 10, 2021, to the date of the indictments, Nov. 19, 2021, as well as any other phone records in the District Attorney’s office’s possession that included investigative information or materials helpful to the defense, as required by law.

The case

King is accused of shooting to death Marquis Simmons, 25, outside his mother’s home on Belvoir Road in Milton a little before 6 p.m. on July 10, 2021.

“He said he was gonna do it, he said he was gonna do it,” Simmons allegedly told a Milton Police officer before he lost consciousness, according to Lally’s statement of the case.

Simmons allegedly identified his shooter as “Mizzie … Mizzie Cash,” which is allegedly King’s rap name, as seen on his YouTube channel, before losing consciousness again.

Paramedics put him into an ambulance, where he allegedly started to seize during transport. He was declared dead at Boston Medical Center at about 10:15 that night.

An autopsy revealed that a bullet entered the front left of Simmons’ left shoulder, then through the top of his left lung and grazed the right lung. The 9mm bullet, which was determined by shell casings found at the scene, left “stippling” at its entry point, indicating a close-contact gunshot.

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