Paula Prado, a juror in the infamous murder retrial of Karen Read, is speaking out after Wednesday’s not guilty verdict.
Prado said she is certain that “something happened inside the house” at 34 Fairview Road in Canton, Massachusetts, where her then-boyfriend, Boston cop John O’Keefe, was found unconscious in the early morning of January 29, 2022.
Prado was one of 12 jurors who acquitted Read of second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating under the influence of alcohol, and leaving the scene of bodily injury.
Read was accused of hitting O’Keefe with her car and leaving him for dead, but Prado said the injuries he sustained “didn’t make much sense.”
“At first for me, I thought Karen Read was actually maybe guilty of manslaughter in the beginning,” Prado told CBS Boston. “But as the weeks passed by, I just realized there was too many holes that we couldn’t fill and there is nothing that put her on the scene, in our opinion, besides just dropping John O’Keefe off.”
Prado added: “And the taillight, the injuries on his arm didn’t make much sense that come from a taillight for us.”
While Prado conceded that Read could have “touched him somehow” with her SUV while backing out of the driveway, she is “100 percent convinced” that the accused was not responsible for the death.
“Either he got out of her way or something, and maybe he lost his shoes in the process,” Prado said. “But in my opinion, he definitely went inside and something happened inside the house.”
Read’s defense team alleged that, after being dropped off by Read at the home, which was owned by fellow Boston police officer Brian Albert, O’Keefe may have been involved in an altercation and then dragged outside. Prado thought it was “weird” that neither Albert nor Brian Higgins, a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent who had exchanged flirtatious texts with Read and who was at the Albert home that night, did not take the stand.
Read herself has previously said that “no one has fought harder for justice” for her former partner than she has. Prado noted that she hopes the case will one day be reopened to “find who actually did that to John.”
Read was convicted only of drunk driving and sentenced to one year of probation.
