DEDHAM, MASS. (WHDH) - Jennifer McCabe, a key witness in the Karen Read retrial, took the stand Tuesday afternoon after a digital forensics expert was cross-examined.
McCabe was one of the two women who was with Read the morning they discovered Boston police officer John O’Keefe’s body outside 34 Fairview Road in Canton, in January 2022.
Read is accused of killing O’Keefe, her boyfriend, by hitting him with her car and leaving him to die in a snowbank after a night of drinking. Her lawyers argue she is being framed. Her first trial last summer ended in a mistrial.
Jennifer McCabe, key witness in the case, takes the stand
Jennifer McCabe, who was one of the most controversial witnesses in the case, said she awoke the morning of John O’Keefe’s death in 2022 to a call from his niece’s phone and Read was screaming repeatedly.
“Jen! Jen! John didn’t come home! She was hysterical,” McCabe testified. “It was very hard to follow what she was saying.”
McCabe testified she saw Read’s Lexus three separate times in different locations outside the Albert home on Fairview hours earlier. And she told the jury when she informed Read of that the next morning, Read changed her story, and begin saying “what if I hit him?”
“When she got on the phone, I had told her, ‘Karen, I saw you guys outside of my sister’s house. And then she told me she didn’t remember being there, and then she started saying, ‘Could I have hit him? Did I hit him?’ And then she was just all over the place, like screaming my name, screaming so many different things,” McCabe said.
She said Read was frantic and after a check of John’s home, she, Read, and another friend Kerry Roberts, who previously testified in the retrial, all went over to the Albert home with Roberts driving to check. Read was sitting in the back of the car.
McCabe testified that the weather was terrible at the time. She said the Nor’easter made visibility terrible and it was dark, but Read sitting in the back seat, claimed she could see something on the lawn.
“All the sudden, Karen is screaming from the back, ‘There he is’ or something, something to the effect of ‘There he is, let me out,'” said McCabe.
“Did you know what she was talking about?” Special Prosecutor Hank Brennan asked.
“I had no idea,” McCabe responded.
“When she was yelling that, did you look out the window?” asked Brennan.
“Yeah. We had our eyes peeled out the window,” said McCabe.
“Did you see anything?” asked Brennan.
“Nothing,” McCabe responded. “I mean, she screamed stop, so Kerry stopped pretty quickly, ‘There he is, there he is.’ She could’ve kicked the door, like ‘let me out of here.”
McCabe has been questioned about her Google search “hos long to die in cold” the morning O’Keefe was found dead. Digital forensics expert Ian Whiffin said Monday he analyzed the data on her phone using a system called Cellebrite.
McCabe will continue her testimony Wednesday morning.
At a late afternoon hearing, Cannone ruled she will allow the defense’s two accident reconstruction witnesses to testify, despite repeated and intentional violations of discovery rules.
They were thought to be independent federal witnesses, but it turned out they had been paid by the defense and communications were not disclosed, while 100 text messages involving Dr. Daniel Wolfe were deleted by him.
Digital forensics expert is cross-examined
Whiffin, who first took the witness stand Monday, was grilled by Read’s legal team on his findings from O’Keefe’s cell phone. Defense attorney Robert Alessi showed the location data from O’Keefe’s iPhone, which was left out of Whiffin’s presentation to the jury the day before.
While on the stand, Whiffin testified he did not believe O’Keefe ever went inside the home, at 34 Fairview Road, owned by Albert at the time. But, under Tuesday’s cross examination, Whiffin acknowledged that O’Keefe’s phone could have been somewhere else.
“The larger white circle covers a substantial amount of the house at 34 Fairview, correct?” Alessi asked.
“Correct,” Whiffin said.
“So, given your testimony on direct yesterday with [special prosecutor Hank] Brennan, the phone of John O’Keefe, according to this depiction, could be anywhere within the largest white circle, correct?” Alessi asked.
“Correct,” Whiffin replied.
On Monday, Whiffin also showed the jury a chart tracking O’Keefe’s phone battery temperature, saying it kept getting colder throughout the night.
But on Tuesday, Alessi asked questions about how he tested the phone’s temperature, pointing out differences in how fast the temperature dropped in an experiment versus the smaller rate of temperature decline for O’Keefe’s phone.
Whiffin also admitted he did not know the temperature in Canton the night O’Keefe died.
On Monday, after the jury left midday, Judge Beverly Cannone held an afternoon hearing over whether the defense can call two ARCCA crash reconstruction experts to testify. It turns out they were also paid by the defense, after the fact.
During an exchange that grew heated at times, Brennan suggested one of the men was an “advocate” for the defense — not an impartial witness.
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