Protesters in support of Karen Read claim her arrest was part of a police cover-up.
The murder trial of college professor Karen Read got underway Monday as supporters called for her acquittal.
Protesters are being ordered to stay across the street from the courthouse in Dedham, Massachusetts, in the murder case that has divided a community and led to conspiracy-fueled allegations of a police cover-up.
Inside the courtroom, the prosecution alleged the finance professor intentionally drove into her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O’Keefe, following a night of bar-hopping.
Surveillance video shows the couple at a bar embracing on the night of January 2022. Later that evening, Read dropped O’Keefe off at a party being thrown by a fellow police officer. Prosecutors alleged when she left, Read intentionally mowed him down in a jealous rage over his seeing another woman.
“Defendant Karen Read is guilty of murder of second degree. Striking the victim, Mr. O’Keefe, with her car, knocking him back onto the ground, striking head on the ground,” the prosecutor said.
The defense said, “Karen Read was framed.”
Read’s supporters claim her arrest is part of a police cover-up.
“There is no possible way that this man was hit by a car, no possible way,” blogger Aidan Kearney tells Inside Edition. “He was inside the house, he was killed inside the house. An obvious cover-up.”
Nick Rocco, who is raising funds for Read, says $159,000 has been raised so far for the movement supporting the professor.
Police say they found pieces of a broken taillight near O’Keefe’s body, but the defense argues that Ring camera footage from O’Keefe’s home shows Read pulling out of his driveway and hitting his car, where she broke her taillight.
Read claims there was hostility between O’Keefe and some people who were at the party house that night that he died.
“The defense has done a good job of painting a narrative that there is a police cover-up in this small town outside of Boston,” Court TV’s Matt Johnson tells Inside Edition
Read has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
