Karen Read looks to crash prosecution's crash theory as defense opens case

Karen Read listens to testimony by accident reconstruction analyst Matthew DiSogra during her murder trial in Norfolk Superior Court in Dedham, Mass., Friday, May 30, 2025. (Mark Stockwell/The Sun Chronicle via AP, Pool)

Following Judge Beverly Cannone sending the jury in Karen Read’s trial home for the weekend, the defense called Jonathan Diamandis to the stand for a voir dire hearing. 

Diamandis is a long-time friend of former investigator Michael Proctor and was questioned by defense attorney David Yannetti about a text message group involving Proctor. 

Yannetti argued to admit the text messages to show the mindset of Proctor following the death of former Boston police officer John O’Keefe. 

“[Proctor] treated some people with kid gloves and other people with brass knuckles,” Yannetti said. “He's stating it in these text messages. ‘She's going to go down for this. We're going to pin it on the girl. We're going to make sure that there are some serious charges.’”

Special prosecutor Hank Brennan argued the defense should instead call Proctor, who is named on the witness list, instead of Diamandis. 

“The person that could best authenticate these text messages is Michael Proctor,” Brennan said. “This witness does nothing as far as identifying the individual text messages and whether they're reliable. Whether there's been any additions [or] deletions.”

Judge Beverly Cannone, left, listens as accident reconstruction analyst Matthew DiSogra testifies during Karen Read's murder trial in Norfolk Superior Court in Dedham, Mass., Friday, May 30, 2025. (Mark Stockwell/The Sun Chronicle via AP, Pool)

Crash reconstruction expert Matt DiSogra testified on cross-examination with special prosecutor Hank Brennan that based on his review of Aperture’s data surrounding Karen Read’s vehicle, he is not suggesting that Read’s vehicle was not in a collision the morning of Jan. 29, 2022. 

“Do you have an opinion to a reasonable degree of forensic data certainty about whether the Techstream data provides data reflecting whether a collision actually occurred?” Brennan asked.  

“No,” DiSogra said. 

“You are not testifying or offering an opinion that there was no collision with this car that night,” Brennan said. “Are you?” 

“No,” DiSogra replied. 

Brennan then concluded questioning of DiSogra, with defense attorney Alan Jackson returning for direct examination. 

“[DiSogra] was excellent,” retired Massachusetts Superior Court Judge and Boston College law professor Jack Lu told Fox News Digital. “The fault is preparation by the lawyer and definition of the scope of the assignment by the lawyer.” 

Lu pointed to DiSogra’s demeanor on the stand as Jackson returned for more questioning, noting DiSogra started strong but appeared "unnerved" by the prosecution.

“He is less confident now than during direct examination," Lu said. "Even though they are on redirect.” 

Karen Read’s trial returned after a lunch recess Friday afternoon with crash reconstructionist Matt DiSogra returning to the witness stand for cross-examination. 

Special prosecutor Hank Brennan pointed to the difference in timestamps between Read’s vehicle turning on the car’s infotainment system, noting a three-second delay between both events. 

DiSogra then confirmed his conclusions are based on reports by Aperture analysts Shanon Burgess and Dr. Judson Welcher, with Brennan asserting that DiSogra was relying on Aperture’s reporting regarding the synchronization of cell phone clocks upon being connected to a vehicle’s infotainment system. 

“My conclusions are based on all of the data that Mr. Burgess laid out,” DiSogra said. “So he laid these out and went so far as to calculate the offsets himself. So there is something implied in his table, by virtue of him calculating these, that maybe he would decide to align them. And so to provide clarity on all the possible alignments, I included them.”

Karen Read stopped to greet supporters outside Norfolk Superior Court as her trial was on a lunch recess Friday afternoon. 

“I know most of them personally at this point,” Read said. “Over the last three and a half years, and they’re here every day and I can’t tell you what this does to my spirits every day.” 

Upon being asked by reporters how she is feeling about being a defendant for a second trial, Read said she “feels battle-tested this time.”

The support comes as Read’s defense team is halfway through the first day of presenting their case for her innocence, asserting that there was never a collision between Read and John O’Keefe on the morning of his death. 

Matthew DiSogra, an accident reconstruction analyst, answers questions asked by prosecutor Hank Brennan during Karen Read's murder trial in Norfolk Superior Court in Dedham, Mass., Friday, May 30, 2025. (Mark Stockwell/The Sun Chronicle via AP, Pool)

Massachusetts trial attorney Grace Edwards says Karen Read's legal team was smart to call their own accident reconstruction expert to kick off the opening of their defense Friday.

"I think the defense getting right on the dispute over timing was good because it matters a lot in this case," she told Fox News Digital. "There was a lot of prosecution testimony that John O’Keefe’s injury would likely have made him unable to lock his phone.  So if the lock event happened after the end of the 10 second recording, how was John O’Keefe able to manipulate his phone?"

Defense witness Matthew DiSogra called the prosecution's timeline of events into question as the first witness on Read's behalf.

He said that out of nearly 30 possible calculations based on data shared by experts for the prosecution, only three showed the lock button on O'Keefe's iPhone being pressed before computers in Read's Lexus SUV registered that it accelerated in reverse.

Twenty-five happened afterward, bolstering the defense claim that she left the scene without hitting him.

Read is accused of backing into her then-boyfriend, a Boston police officer, and leaving him to die on the ground during a blizzard.

Her lawyers deny that she hit him and say he sustained his fatal injuries some other way.

"So was he struck by Karen Read’s vehicle or not?" Edwards asked. "The prosecution is going to try and rebut this by arguing even if the recording even ended before John O’Keefe’s lock event, the car was traveling in reverse -- because the triggering event was not a collision but the car going in reverse."

The timing is key to both sides, she said.

Judge Beverly Cannone just cleared jurors to head out for a one-hour lunch break.

William Read, Karen Read's father, posed for selfies with her supporters outside the courthouse during a morning recess Friday.

"I'm always the oldest one in these shots," he said, prompting laughter. "I guess it's better than the alternative, huh?"

His daughter is accused of killing her boyfriend, Boston Police Officer John O'Keefe, by hitting him with her Lexus SUV and leaving him to die on the ground in a blizzard on Jan. 29, 2022.

Inside the courthouse, her defense team began their case this morning after 23 days of testimony from witnesses for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

She has pleaded not guilty and her lawyers deny that her vehicle ever collided with O'Keefe.

Back from break, special prosecutor Hank Brennan picks up the questioning.

Off the bat, he asked crash reconstruction expert Matt DiSogra about whether a crash could've happened.

"Sir, are you trying to offer an opinion suggesting that Miss Read's Lexus never hit John O'Keefe on January 29th, 2022?" Brennan asked. "Is that your opinion?"

Defense attorney Alan Jackson objected, but Judge Beverly Cannone said she would allow the questioning.

"No sir," DiSogra said.

He also testified that he has no subspeciality expertise in mobile phone forensics and did no actualy testing on Read's case - he was critiquing the reports from prosecution experts.

Accident reconstruction analyst Matthew DiSogra testifies during Karen Read's murder trial in Norfolk Superior Court in Dedham, Mass., Friday, May 30, 2025. (Mark Stockwell/The Sun Chronicle via AP, Pool)

The first witness for Karen Read's defense is a crash reconstruction expert who aimed to take down the prosecution's timeline regarding the last recorded interaction between victim John O'Keefe and his iPhone compared to "black box" data from her 2021 Lexus SUV.

Matthew DiSogra was tasked with interpreting the Aperture reports by Shanon Burgess and Dr. Judson Welcher for the defense.

Based on January reports received from Aperture, he said, there were no instances where he found O'Keefe locked his iPhone before Read's car recorded her going in reverse. In Aperture's amended reports, issued in May, three calculations showed the phone lock beforehand, one at the same time, and 25 times afterward.

With a three-second adjustment pointed out in Burgess' initial report but not applied, DiSogra said, calculations based on the amended report again do not show any instances of O'Keefe locking his phone before to the data event.

According to prior testimony, O'Keefe's last recorded human contact with his phone came when he hit the lock button around 12:30 a.m. at 34 Fairview Road in Canton, Massachusetts, about 20 miles south of Boston.

Data from Read's Lexus showed that it went in reverse at roughly the same time. Burgess and DiSogra disagreed over whether the data event indicates the exact time when she stopped going in reverse in the real world.

Read and two friends found him at the same address hours later, with his phone under his body, on the ground in a blizzard.

After about an hour and a half of questioning from defense attorney Alan Jackson, Judge Beverly Cannone called a morning break.

Morning recess called as defense attorney Alan Jackson winds down questioning of crash expert Matt DiSogra, from a firm called Delta V.

Prosecutor Hank Brennan speaks to Dr. Judson Welcher, an accident reconstruction expert, during the murder retrial of Karen Read in Norfolk Superior Court, Thursday, May 29, 2025, in Dedham, Mass. (AP Photo/Mark Stockwell, Pool)

Special prosecutor Hank Brennan asked the court to block Karen Read's defense team from calling a group of newly announced witnesses to discuss a group text with Michael Proctor, the former Massachusetts state trooper who lost his job in March following an internal investigation that grew out of his testimony during her first trial.

The witnesses and their texts are an effort to introduce "inadmissible hearsay," Brennan wrote to the judge.

"Furthermore, the text messages contain hearsay upon hearsay, and each statement and text message must conform with an exception to the hearsay rule," he wrote, asserting that none of them have applicable exceptions and that Proctor, who is on the defense witness list, is available to testify.

The defense on Tuesday announced four supplemental witnesses.

In Brennan's filing, he wrote that the defense plans to call four people with phone numbers "associated with a federally protected and confidential series of text messages from Michael Proctor's personal cellphone.

"The text chain involved more than 38,000 text messages between nine people from October 2021 to August 2022, according to Brennan, and only three people on it were saved in Proctor's phone, under "partial contact names."

In a separate motion, the prosecution also asked for copies of all written communications between Read's legal team and defense witness Kelly Denver.

Karen Read and attorney Alan Jackson look at the empty jury box while listening to Judge Cannone during Read's murder trial in Norfolk Superior Court in Dedham, Mass., Wednesday, May 21, 2025. (Greg Derr/The Patriot Ledger via AP, Pool)

Karen Read's defense team asked Judge Beverly Cannone to find her not guilty Friday, arguing that the prosecution failed to prove its case against her.

Alan Jackson argued for his motion for a required finding of not guilty the morning after special prosecutor Hank Brennan rested his case.

He said that prosecutors could not prove there was a collision and that prosecution experts, relying on circumstantial evidence, merely showed that Read's SUV went in reverse. 

Brennan countered that a "reasonable fact finder" would agree that Read was intoxicated and said the evidence of a collision was "abundant" -- including shattered taillight fragments in O'Keefe's clothes. He said in Read's own words, she expected to find O'Keefe where she found him, and that data showed she'd backed up in the same place hours earlier. 

Grace Edwards, a Massachusetts defense attorney who is following the case, said it's a standard defense move made once the prosecution rests.

"It allows Jackson to argue that the commonwealth has not met their burden," she told Fox News Digital. "In this type of a case, it will likely be denied."

It was. Cannone immediately rejected the motion after the lawyers spoke to the court, and she called jurors to come in.

"On a murder [charge], she would never take the case from the jury," Edwards said.

Karen Read listens to digital forensics analyst Shanon Burgess during his testimony during her trial Tuesday, May 20, 2025, in Dedham, Mass. (Matt Stone/The Boston Herald via AP, Pool)

Karen Read’s defense team is ready to begin tearing down the prosecution’s murder case against her after the commonwealth rested its case this week.

Read is accused of killing her boyfriend, Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, outside an acquaintance's house party just after midnight on Jan. 29, 2022.

The prosecution alleges that Read struck him with her 2021 Lexus SUV in a drunken rage, before leaving him to freeze to death in the front yard of 34 Fairview Road in Canton, Massachusetts, 20 miles south of Boston.

Read’s defense team is set to begin presenting their case on Friday as attorneys Alan Jackson, David Yannetti and Robert Alessi look to sow reasonable doubt around the state’s allegations, 

READ THE FULL STORY