Karen Read retrial Day 4 reveals blood alcohol over the legal limit

Flint McColgan, Boston Herald on Apr 25, 2025

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DEDHAM, Mass. — Karen Read had a blood alcohol content of around 0.093%, well over the legal driving limit of 0.08% hours after she allegedly struck and killed John O’Keefe with her car.

That BAC figure comes from using the common conversion method of serum ethanol levels, a method described by MedScape.com among other sources. The BAC conversion was not done in the courtroom on Friday, the fourth day of the Read murder retrial, but the serum testing results were provided.

Dr. Garrey Faller, who at the time of O’Keefe’s death on Jan. 29, 2022, was the chief pathologist and lab director at Good Samaritan Hospital in Brockton, said that Read was tested at 93 mg/dL ethanol at around 9 a.m. that day. Prosecutors say that Read struck and killed O’Keefe after midnight that morning, which means many hours had passed before her testing.

Faller’s lab employed a clinical testing method using a “Roche Cobas machine,” which spins and separates the whole blood and then tests just the serum, or “the watery part” of the blood, Faller said.

Defense attorney Elizabeth Little challenged the veracity of such clinical testing as opposed to forensic testing methods, which requires an ethanol test of the whole blood and not the serum. Faller admitted that his lab was not certified for forensic testing but was certified for clinical testing.

“It’s a very, very accurate test but there are some limitations,” Faller said.

Earlier breaking story

On this, the fourth day of the Karen Read trial, jurors are scheduled to visit the property where John O’Keefe lay dead or dying in a major snowstorm on Jan. 29, 2022.

It is raining in sections of the region this morning and it is unclear if the inclement weather will change the plans for the day. There are a couple of witnesses expected to testify today but a clerk told the Herald yesterday that even with the viewing court is not expected to last the full day.

The viewing will have the jurors take a bus to 34 Fairview Road in Canton, where Read and two other women, Kerry Roberts — who was the second witness called in this trial — and Jennifer McCabe, who will become very important to the defense’s theory of a cover up, found O’Keefe in what Roberts called “a mound of snow.”

Yesterday was dominated by the shocking “toxic” text messages between Karen Read and her BPD Officer boyfriend O’Keefe.

Read, 45, of Mansfield, faces charges of second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating a motor vehicle under the influence, and leaving the scene of an accident causing death.

Prosecutors say that Read backed her Lexus SUV into O’Keefe at up to 24 mph in the early morning hours of Jan. 29, 2022, leaving him to freeze and die on the front lawn of 34 Fairview Road in Canton. She was tried last year but that ended in mistrial.

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