A Massachusetts jury found Karen Read not guilty of murder by reason of O.J. Simpson on Wednesday. If the broken taillight did not hit, you must acquit.
O.J. Simpson vowed to find the “real killers” after his acquittal. Read said outside the courtroom Wednesday, “No one has fought harder for justice for John O’Keefe than I have.”
As Simpson tormenter Norm Macdonald might joke if cancer did not murder him: What terrible luck that the person who fights the hardest for justice for you winds up murdering you.
Read stood accused of killing her Boston policeman boyfriend with her car in a 2022 snowstorm after a night of hard drinking. But she’s a woman and her boyfriend was a policeman — who had policeman friends who probably killed other policemen and framed innocent women for their crimes. In Massachusetts, they find such evidence quite compelling.
From the beginning, the Karen Read case resembled a political campaign more than a criminal trial. On Massachusetts roads, drivers spotted numerous “Free Karen Read” lawn signs, akin to those bearing the names of candidates, before her name entered into the common vernacular. Her two trials generated a party atmosphere outside the courthouse, complete with cheers, selfies, a special hand signal for the initiated (or the deaf), and pink team colors. A cult of personality grew around the telegenic Read, who went on a successful media campaign. Her talented defense team won an acquittal by winning the public relations campaign.
Inside the courtroom, evidence suggests that none of the other eight billion people on the planet killed Karen Read’s boyfriend.
Read’s Lexus showed her car driving backwards at 24 miles per hour, which seems awfully fast for reverse in a snowstorm, for about 60 feet at the very residential street address where the next morning she and two women found an unresponsive O’Keefe with a fractured skull. At the very time this happened, O’Keefe’s phone stopped moving from 12:32 a.m. until the discovery of his body at 6:04 a.m.
Two witnesses, a paramedic and Jennifer McCabe, one of the women who found the body, testified that Read repeatedly said she had hit her boyfriend. The defense pointed out that during her grand jury testimony, McCabe had quoted Read as asking if and not declaring that she had struck O’Keefe. She responded, “I can tell you with 100 percent accuracy, she said ‘I hit him, I hit him, I hit him.’”
Read regarded the vodka and tonics served that night as too weak and decided to fortify them with shots. Her blood-alcohol content at 9:08 a.m., more than eight hours after she had allegedly stopped partying, measured at .093 — still above the legal limit for driving. After Read dropped O’Keefe off but before the discovery of his body, she called him 44 times. She left such voicemails as “I f—ing hate you” and “You’re f—ing another girl.”
On Dragnet, Joe Friday might call that “motive.” But Dragnet did not raise this generation of Americans. CSI did.
So, her defenders asked why police collected taillight fragments from the snow with a Solo cup, raised suspicions, subsequently discredited by the prosecution, as to whether McCabe googled “hos [sic] long to die in cold” hours before she found the body, and ominously noted that the couple in the house where Read had dropped O’Keefe off later sold it.
Not just CSI but The X-Files raised this generation. So, Read’s votaries conjured up the idea that maybe a dog killed O’Keefe or perhaps his fellow cops did, which would somehow explain why a paramedic would join the police in framing Read. And a since-fired investigator with the state police dubbed Read a “wack job c—.” That makes her, of course, not a “wack job c—” but innocent.
Maybe her Lexus LX 570 was in on the conspiracy, too?
One cannot think that any man in Massachusetts, or anywhere for that matter, could drunkenly run over his girlfriend while in a rage against her and portray himself as the victim. But a Massachusetts jury found Karen Read not guilty, and the defendant left the courtroom as a celebrity. The bias that granted O.J. Simpson an acquittal involved his race. For Read, the bias that transformed her into the aggrieved party involves her sex.
Maybe she gets a Hertz commercial out of this?
Karen Read is like O.J. Simpson, except that she never rushed for 2,003 yards or catapulted off Anaheim Stadium’s upper deck in a wheelchair.
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