Massachusetts

When it comes to economic impact from Boston sports, April quite literally got off to a running start with the Boston Marathon.

With the Bruins and Celtics set to start the playoffs this weekend at TD Garden, excitement and business are booming.

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While Friday marked a pause in jury selection for the Karen Read murder trial, jurors are still top of mind.

Or, more specifically, the jury box, which is the latest focus of defense attorneys who say the seating for jurors in the courtroom at the Norfolk Superior Court violates their client’s constitutional right to confront witnesses face-to-face because of poor sight lines.

“The defendant’s right of confrontation is affected, because that’s why we have juries is to determine the credibility of the witnesses, and what the facts are, and if they are not able to do that fully, there is a legitimate argument that that affects her confrontation clause under the sixth amendment,” explained NBC10 Boston legal analyst Michael Coyne.

In a high-profile and controversial case, Read is accused of hitting and killing her boyfriend, Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, with her SUV in Canton, Massachusetts, in January 2022. Her attorneys say she is being framed in a wide-ranging coverup. NBC10 Boston Political Commentator Sue O’Connell, who has been inside the courtroom for jury selection, noted that Read seems very involved in her defense, frequently consulting with her team during the juror interviews.

Read’s lawyers have a motion – asking to change the seating so jurors will look directly at witnesses during testimony. They say jurors must be able to see them so they can access their credibility. They’ve even submitted images of defense attorney David Yannetti on the stand, claiming at least six jurors will only see the back of a witness’ head.

“Never have I seen a courtroom in which the jury box is positioned in such a way that a segment of the jury can only see the back of a witness’s head while testifying,” Yannetti wrote in the motion, comparing the setup to his experiences in numerous other courtrooms in the state.

The defense says it has offered an alternative seating arrangement.

Coyne agreed with the concerns of Read’s lawyers, saying seeing witnesses is important for the jury and lawyers.

“The way that courtroom is set up the lawyers can’t see all the jurors and what you want be able to do as the lawyers is see what’s resonating with jury, what’s their reacting to, what they’re ignoring, ‘cause that helps you shape the balance of your trial.”

The courthouse in Dedham is an older building and seating is already tight. It remains to be seen if the judge will make changes.

Four more jurors are needed before opening statements can get underway. All parties will return to court next week to finish jury selection.

Reports of antisemitic incidents reaching an all-time high led a local Jewish organization to reshape its goal to create a safe space for Jewish teenagers.

The Anti-Defamation League released a new report this week citing record-high numbers of antisemitic incidents in New England, showing a total of 623 recorded incidents of assault, harassment, and vandalism in the region in 2023 — about a 200 percent increase from the year prior.

Of those 623 incidents, 351 happened after the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel.

“It’s very important for people from all backgrounds to understand the complex situation that our Jewish teens are in right now: they’re really struggling,” Rabbi Yudi Riesel, the Director of the NCSY/JSU Boston division, said.

The National Council of Synagogue Youth (NCSY) is an Orthodox Jewish organization that started in the 1950s with the goal of getting Jewish youth to connect with their heritage. JSU, Jewish Student Union, is a subset of NCSY that started in the 2000s. It’s a public high school Jewish club that serves all Jewish teenagers from different backgrounds. There are hundreds of JSU and NCSY divisions – including Boston.

Yuval Levy, a senior at Brookline High School, said JSU is her place of Jewish joy.

“I was in so much pain from the war. I was grieving, and I didn’t have a community and I felt so isolated and so alone,” Levy, who has family in Israel, said. “[JSU] was a spiritual experience of just being together. I didn’t realize how much I needed that.”

The organization services about 450 students in Boston and according to their website, they service about 14,000 students with more than 350 clubs nationwide.

“I realized that there was a place here for me to be able to embrace my Judaism,” said Reuben Setboun, a junior at Newton South High School.

Rabbi Riesel said that before the Hamas attack on Israel, JSU was a fun place where students attended events and dinners and looked forward to trips to other cities including Miami and New York, but now the organization has taken on a new meaning.

“After Oct. 7, the amount of tears I had to watch these young teens shed in school,” Riesel said. “We felt like we had to rise to the occasion.”

Brookline High School senior Gabriel Spagat said he has felt the rise in antisemitism personally.

“Most people – they look at me and they don’t see someone who has family in Israel, who is Jewish myself,” he said. “People have talked to me and have said very anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist, anti-Israel things and they expect me to agree because in their minds, I’m just an Asian kid, there’s no way I’m Jewish.”

Spagat said JSU is the only place he feels safe to talk about how he feels:

“It’s given me that one small bright light of hope that things will get better.”

Breweries come in all shapes and sizes, from basement businesses to single rooms where the owner might be pouring beers for customers to restaurants that just happen to include beermaking operations.

And some breweries are true destinations, multip…

The high-profile murder charges against Karen Read are finally set for trial, and the judge in the case is allowing Read’s attorneys to raise the question they have been asking for over a year: Who killed Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe?

Prosecutors argue Read is responsible for her boyfriend’s 2022 death outside a Canton home, charging her with second-degree murder. Read’s defense team has long held that she is being framed in a cover-up.

Norfolk Superior Court Judge Beverly Cannone agreed to allow Read’s team to, with limits, use a third-party culprit defense — something prosecutors had sought to prevent — making the question of whether she or someone else is responsible a major part of the trial.

As the complicated case goes to trial, here are some elements to keep in mind:

John O’Keefe’s death and Karen Read’s arrest

O’Keefe was found in the snow on the morning of Jan. 29, 2022, and later pronounced dead at a hospital. Read was arrested days later on suspicion of hitting him with her SUV and leaving him to die.

In the hours beforehand, O’Keefe and Read had been drinking at a bar with a group of people. That group included Brian Albert, another Boston police officer, and his sister-in-law, Jennifer McCabe — who are both now among dozens of witnesses who could be called to testify at trial.

Prosecutors have said they were at C.F. McCarthy’s bar in Canton with several friends on the night of Jan. 28, then went to Waterfall Bar & Grille across the street around 11 p.m.and stayed for about an hour. They left there and were invited to Albert’s home on Fairview Road. Hours later, O’Keefe would be found fatally injured outside that house.

Read told police she dropped O’Keefe off at the house shortly after midnight and went home because she was having stomach issues. Early in the morning, after she was unable to get O’Keefe to respond to her calls and texts, Read said she returned to the home with McCabe and Kerry Roberts, another potential witness at trial. They found O’Keefe unresponsive outside the home on Fairview Road in the snow amid blizzard-like conditions.

An autopsy found several abrasions to O’Keefe’s right forearm, two black eyes, a cut to his nose, a two-inch laceration to the back of his head and multiple skull fractures. Hypothermia was also believed to be a contributing factor in his death.

Read was arrested three days after O’Keefe’s body was found. Initially charged with manslaughter, she was later charged with second-degree murder, to which she has pleaded not guilty.

The prosecution’s case against Read

The office of Norfolk County District Attorney Michael Morrissey has said that Read suggested to McCabe and Roberts, as well as to a Canton firefighter/paramedic at the scene, that she believed she hit O’Keefe with her SUV.

Investigators found the SUV at her parents’ house and seized it. Prosecutors said the 2021 black Lexus SUV had a shattered right rear taillight and several scratches on its rear bumper. There were shards of glass embedded in the bumper, prosecutors said, consistent with a glass O’Keefe had previously been seen holding.

Pieces of the taillight were also found in the snow outside the home on Fairview Road, prosecutors have said. Earlier this year, they said the Massachusetts State Police Crime Laboratory had found O’Keefe’s DNA on the taillight.

“The victim and the defendant had been arguing for quite some time. Numerous times over the weeks preceding this, that on one occasion the victim had attempted to break up with the defendant, had asked her to leave his home and she refused to do so,” Assistant Norfolk District Attorney Adam Lally said in court last year.

In court documents, prosecutors cite voicemails left on O’Keefe’s phone “in the time period surrounding” his death, in which Read allegedly screamed, “John, I f***ing hate you,” called him a pervert and accused him of cheating on her.

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The same documents also describe a trip to Aruba a month before O’Keefe’s death. Witnesses, including O’Keefe’s teenage niece, alleged confrontational behavior from Read. The girl, who was 14 at the time, said Read accused O’Keefe of kissing someone else, leading to a 20-minute argument in their hotel room. A longtime friend of O’Keefe also described an incident in which Read allegedly yelled “f*** you” at her after she bumped into O’Keefe in the lobby and hugged him.

Amid the media firestorm surrounding the case, authorities have also arrested Aidan Kearney, a popular blogger better known as “Turtleboy,” on charges of witness intimidation involving his writing on and advocacy involving the case. They later said Read sent Kearney confidential information during dozens of hours of phone calls.

The defense’s claims of a coverup

Since 2022, Read’s team has alleged a large-scale coverup in the case. They have pointed to a search made on McCabe’s cellphone, evidence on O’Keefe’s body and questions about the investigation and court proceedings.

Last April, in a motion seeking access to Albert’s phone records, Read’s attorneys said records from McCabe’s phone showed she had searched the phrase, “Hos [sic] long to die in cold” on Google hours before 911 was called to report O’Keefe was found in the snow.

Read’s attorneys say the records show the search was made around 2:30 a.m. But prosecutors have disputed the timing, arguing McCabe made the search after O’Keefe was found unresponsive. It’s been a major point of contention in the trial.

Maintaining that the search was made earlier, defense attorneys Alan Jackson and David Yannetti said in a statement last year that the evidence establishes other people “were aware that John was dying in the snow before Karen even knew he was missing.”

In a document responding to Read’s motion to dismiss indictments against her, the Norfolk County District Attorney’s Office said the state “did not withhold exculpatory evidence pertaining to Jennifer McCabe’s google searches from the grand jury. The purported ‘incriminating’ google search did not appear in the initial download given the version of Cellebrite software that existed at the time.”

However, no one besides Read has been charged in O’Keefe’s death, and Morrissey, the district attorney, has spoken out against public speculation that they were involved in the killing, which he characterized as harassment.

Read’s attorneys have also said the wounds found on O’Keefe’s arm were not consistent with a crash but with an animal attack, and said the Alberts had a dog that was sent away months after O’Keefe’s death. Prosecutors have called their questions into the whereabouts of the family’s dog a “fishing expedition.”

A judge granted the defense’s request for any information the town of Canton has on the dog last year, and a notice of discovery filed by prosecutors days before the trial referred to veterinary genetic lab work. Whether the issue of the dog is raised at trial remains to be seen.

Defense attorneys also say the state police investigator in charge of the case had ties to the Albert family, as did a Canton police officer involved in the early part of the investigation.

Massachusetts State Police announced in March that Trooper Michael Proctor was the subject of an internal investigation. Sources told NBC10 Boston the probe was in connection with the Read case, for which he served as lead investigator. But Proctor remained on full duty amid the internal investigation, and the Norfolk County District Attorney’s Office said investigation had not impacted Proctor’s case assignments.

Throughout the pretrial period, the defense has argued Proctor was “conflicted,” sharing photos purportedly showing the trooper with relatives of Albert as far back as 2012. The prosecution has maintained there was no conflict for investigators and that the defense’s claims were a distraction from the issue.

How does ‘Turtleboy’ factor into the case?

Kearney has covered the case extensively on his “Turtleboy,” website and social media pages, advocating for Read’s innocence in hundreds of posts. With the publicity he brought to Read’s claims of a coverup came intense protests and, according to prosecutors, harassment of witnesses.

The controversial blogger was arrested in October on charges of witness intimidation and conspiracy. He was ordered at the time to stay away and have no contact with witnesses in the case.

Kearney’s bail was later revoked after new charges of assault and battery and witness intimidation were brought against him, leaving him in jail for about 90 days. The charges stem from claims that he pushed a woman he was dating and threatened to release personal information and explicit photos of her.

Upon his release from jail, Kearney was charged with new crimes against the same woman: harassing a witness and intercepting written or oral communication.

“He threatened her in saying that, if she didn’t cooperate, he would destroy her in front of her kids by publishing old probate court records that he had acquired,” a prosecutor said in court, adding that she found out Kearney had recorded their conversation when he posted an edited version online following the assault charge.

Kearney has denied the allegations, writing on his blog that the woman “is making this up because she personally hates Karen Read and is jealous of her due to the fact that she believes Turtleboy is in love with Read.”

According to a Massachusetts State Police search warrant affidavit released in January, Read fed information to Kearney, including personal details about witnesses in the case, autopsy photographs, crime scene photographs, images of her car and the 911 call made when O’Keefe’s body was found.

The two allegedly communicated directly for more than 40 hours during 189 phone calls. Police also allege Read and Kearney interacted via intermediaries and the Signal messaging app.

“The prosecution is doubling down on defective theories of witness intimidation that we are in the process of attacking at the SJC in Mr. Kearney’s case,” his defense attorney, Timothy Bradl, said in a statement. “The only crime here is the robbery of privacy.”

“Turtleboy does not reveal sources,” Kearney wrote on his website the same day. “However, there is nothing wrong or criminal about seeking out people close to Karen Read in order to write a story about her. At no point did Karen Read ever direct content on the Turtleboy website.”

“Free Karen Read” merchandise with the “Turtleboy” logo remain available for sale on Kearney’s website; past stories have said proceeds go to a fund for Read’s legal defense.

What’s next?

Jury selection in Read’s case began April 16. Once a jury is seated, the trial is expected to last six to eight weeks.

Two unsettling reports of animal cruelty involving dogs in different towns in Massachusetts were unfounded, according to police.

Authorities in Townsend and Newburyport issued press releases Friday looking to debunk rumors that had been circulating…