DEDHAM, MASS. (WHDH) - Another juror in the Karen Read murder retrial is pulling back the curtain on how the jury reached their verdict.
Paula Prado, Juror #11, said she is confident the jury followed the evidence and did what was right in acquitting Read on most charges.
“The commonwealth and the investigation couldn’t actually prove and show evidence enough to make us convict her of anything,” Prado said.
Prado said her heart goes out to Boston police officer John O’Keefe’s family, but she does not believe Read killed him.
She described the moment the verdict was read aloud in court Wednesday.
“I heard the people outside, and that’s when I started crying, because the people outside made the family of John O’Keefe feel very sad, just hearing that,” Prado said. “So that moment broke my heart.”
Prado also said she and her fellow jurors were “shocked with so many holes in the case.”
After nearly two months of testimony and almost 50 witnesses, she said the jury was split at the beginning of deliberations.
“Half and half when we first got there,” Prado said. “Last Friday, we didn’t do anything, we just all wanted to talk, put it out, because too many days without talking about it. And Monday we started to look into it, the evidence, the witnesses, the videos, and the tail light, and clothes.”
At first, Prado thought Read might have killed her boyfriend, but said as the jury dug deeper into the evidence, she took issue with the investigation, calling it “sloppy” and “lazy.”
“No reports, nobody made an official report of the GPS location of the Evidence 1, 2, 3. Oh yeah, the Ring camera disappeared, we don’t have two minutes of the recording anymore, all those coincidences didn’t make sense,” she said.
Ultimately, the jurors all agreed that the case was filled with too many holes for a guilty verdict. For Prado, the biggest red flag was the tail light.
“We all took a look close to the tail light and we couldn’t make the damage of the tail light compatible with the injuries on his body,” she said.
She said she feels confident in her decision.
“It wasn’t that hard, I think we were very respectful and everybody left feeling like they did the right thing,” Prado said.
The criminal trial is over, but Read could still face a civil trial.
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