Karen Read Describes Finding John O’Keefe’s Body in TV Interview

Karen Read, the Massachusetts woman accused of hitting her boyfriend with her SUV and leaving him for dead in a blizzard, spoke out about finding her fatally wounded partner in a new TV interview.

A clip from an upcoming 20/20 special about her trial aired Friday morning on Good Morning America. Her first trial for the alleged murder of John O’Keefe, a Boston police officer, ended in a mistrial in July, with a new trial scheduled to take place in January.

Prosecutors say Read and O’Keefe had been out drinking with friends in Canton, Massachusetts, in Jan. 2022. They alleged that when Read dropped O’Keefe at an after-party at a friend’s house later in the night, an intoxicated Read reversed into him with her SUV and left him for dead in a snowbank. She pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder and manslaughter charges.

Speaking in the TV interview, Read answered “yes” when asked if she had been angry with O’Keefe on the night of the fatal incident.

“Could you have been angry enough and slightly drunk, because he had annoyed you, that, in a fit of rage, you just backed up…” ABC’s Matt Gutman asked, with Read interrupting the question to say: “Never.”

He asked if she might have “tried to tap him” with the vehicle as opposed to intending to kill him. “To tap him with my 6,000 pound full-size SUV?” Read answered incredulously. “To hit John’s body with my car? No.”

In Read’s version of events, she says she last saw O’Keefe after dropping him at the house party before she returned home to sleep. Later, she claimed to have woken up during the night to find O’Keefe wasn’t there. Recalling that time in the interview, Read said she called O’Keefe’s friends and their wives and described the mental anguish she experienced.

“Now I have an immense sense of dread,” she said. “Like a fright in me that I have not experienced before.” She added that she was “worried he might’ve gotten hit by a plow” on the snowy evening.

Read then described finding O’Keefe after meeting his friends and returning to the house of the after-party.

“His eyes were shut and he had spots of blood in different areas on his face,” Read said in the interview. “And he was still. Not stiff, but still. It was cold.” O’Keefe was later pronounced dead, with an autopsy ruling that he’d died from head trauma and hypothermia.

She also described speaking on the phone to a friend and telling them: “‘I think I’m gonna get arrested.’”

Prosecutors said Read and O’Keefe had been arguing before she drove him to the after-party house and had deliberately hit him with the car. They also said pieces of her damaged tail light were found at the scene and cited emergency workers who responded to the incident saying Read repeatedly declared “I hit him.”

Read’s defense lawyers, meanwhile, argued that O’Keefe’s injuries weren’t consistent with being hit by a car and claimed she had been the victim of a cover-up. “There are people in that house that are actually responsible for his death and who murdered him,” Alan Jackson, an attorney for Read, told ABC. “And there are others in the house who are covering up that murder.”

A deadlocked jury led to a judge declaring a mistrial. As well as a new criminal trial, O’Keefe’s family is suing Read and two bars in Canton in a wrongful death suit.

The full interview airs Friday on ABC at 9 p.m. Eastern Time and will also be available to stream on Hulu.