Karen Read trial witness faces brutal cross-examination over vehicle data
Karen Read’s defense revved up its attacks on unexpected new expert findings Tuesday, which contradict the timeline they say proves she didn’t hit boyfriend John O’Keefe with her Lexus SUV and leave him to die in a blizzard in 2022.
Shanon Burgess, an expert on vehicle and phone data from the digital forensics firm Aperture, returned to the stand for a second day of brutal cross-examination with defense attorney Robert Alessi at the wheel.
Alessi pointed out inconsistencies in Burgess’ resume and revealed he got the dates wrong on a timeline that was supposed to be accurate “to the second.” And nothing in Burgess’ findings directly indicated that a fatal crash happened.
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“As you sit here today, none of the information in that black box that you referred to on direct testimony indicates that there was a collision on Jan. 29,” Alessi said. “Does it?”
“Not by itself,” Burgess replied.
Special prosecutor Hank Brennan pumped the brakes when he returned for redirect questioning, asking the expert about flaws he had found in a previous analysis that indicated O’Keefe, a Boston police officer, was interacting with his iPhone after the time when prosecutors allege he was fatally struck by the defendant.
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The math veered out of alignment, Burgess testified. A defense expert had relied on call logs to synchronize the internal clocks in Read’s Lexus SUV and O’Keefe’s iPhone.
But that doesn’t work, Burgess explained, because the expert used calls that Read made when her car was powered off, so the vehicle’s internal clock had nothing to do with them. Their timing was the product of the internal clock on her smartphone, which he said synced up with the Lexus the next time she turned it on.
Those calls indicated a variance of just one or two seconds between the vehicle and the victim’s phone.
Using other metrics, including user data stored in the Lexus that prior analysts failed to identify and recover, the variance inflates to between 21 and 29 seconds, Burgess testified.
It is unclear whether Burgess’ credibility is running out of gas with jurors after Alessi found online resumes that wrongly stated he has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Alabama.
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“This expert needs to go home,” said Grace Edwards, a Massachusetts defense attorney who is following the case. She said the prosecution is risking the chance that jurors will find him “shady” and disregard his findings, even though a bachelor’s degree is not required in his field.
“This is a murder trial,” she told Fox News Digital. “And the fact that he got the beginning and the end date on the slide wrong just screams his work is sloppy and he does not fact-check his work.”
She pointed to Burgess’ apparent mix-up of bits and bytes when referring to data obtained from Read’s SUV.
“Attorney Alessi set up a trap that he walked into, which destroyed Burgess on the stand,” Edwards said. “Precision matters when you are a tech expert.”
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Burgess testified that he does not have a bachelor’s degree, despite his official Aperture bio and an old LinkedIn account, which appears to have been deactivated in the past few days, stating otherwise.
Brennan attempted to repair the damage by showing jurors two updated resumes, from last year and this year, that Burgess had submitted to the defense prior to trial, showing his credentials. Neither claimed that he has a bachelor’s degree.
“Did you ever hear of Bill Gates?” Brennan asked.
“Yes,” Burgess replied, referring to the billionaire Microsoft founder who famously dropped out of Harvard before graduation.
Burgess eventually said he would like to get his bachelor’s degree some day, but “work, family and life” keep getting in the way.
“As a personal objective, I would like to finish my bachelor’s,” Burgess testified. “But again, work and life gets in the way.”
After he left the witness stand, Brennan played three clips of Read discussing the timeline in her own words for a TV documentary. She said she believes O’Keefe died around 12:30 a.m. on Jan. 29, 2022.
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The next witness was Christina Hanley, an analyst at the Massachusetts State Police Crime Lab who examined the broken glass found near O’Keefe’s remains at 34 Fairview Road in Canton, about 20 miles south of Boston.
Hanley is expected to return to the stand at 9 a.m. Wednesday.