Karen Read’s defense pathologist calls criticism from her role as RI medical examiner ‘bulls—‘
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John O’Keefe did not hit the back of his head and suffer fatal injuries on the lawn where Karen Read found him the morning after prosecutors allege she clipped him with her Lexus SUV and left him to die in a blizzard, according to a defense expert.
“If you fall back on a flat surface, you get, many times the tear you get in the scalp can be more like a star because you just hit one part, and then the tears go and kind of a star pattern,” testified Dr. Elizabeth Laposata, pointing to an evidence photo not shown on the courthouse video stream.
“And also, because you would not have those vertical, discrete vertical scraping of the skin, you, you would tend to if you fell back on grass, you would tend to see, you might see grass in the wound, or you would tend to see an irregular kind of crisscross pattern of the flattened grass. And that’s not what we have here on Mr. O’Keefe.”
She said he must’ve hit his head on an uneven surface – one she said she didn’t see in photographs of the lawn at 34 Fairview Road in Canton, Massachusetts, where O’Keefe was found under a blanket of snow around 6 a.m. on Jan, 29, 2022.
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“But that ridge also, it wasn’t smooth,” she testified. “It had some little grainy, grainy things sticking up on it.”
While she agreed that blunt force trauma to the head killed O’Keefe, she also said she did not see signs of hypothermia, alleging that the second cause of death in his official autopsy was misdiagnosed.
Laposata’s testimony also contradicted the testimony of Dr. Aizik Wolf, a brain surgeon who took the stand for the prosecution earlier in the trial and said O’Keefe’s skull fracture showed “classic” signs of a fall.
“The only way he could get this kind of an injury was to fall backwards, hit the back of his head, and then the resulting energy forces going into his brain, into the base of his skull,” said Wolf, who testified that he’d seen numerous injuries, often fatal, from backward falls in icy Minnesota weather early in his career.
“This is what happens when soft tissue hits a solid ground,” he testified.
Read’s defense scored a minor victory before jurors arrived in court Tuesday for the 30th day of her murder trial in the death of O’Keefe, her former boyfriend and a Boston police officer.
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Attorney Alan Jackson asked Judge Beverly Cannone to reconsider and order yesterday blocking defense witness Laposata from testifying about dog bites.
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After a contentious back and forth with Brennan, which saw the two talking over one another and raising their voices, Cannone denied the request but also offered a compromise.
“In her experience, Mr. Jackson, you have to lay a foundation in her experience saying animal bites,” Cannone said. “This is consistent with what she has seen in an animal bite.”
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Laposata is a forensic pathologist and professor at Brown University’s medical school, whom Jackson described as “absolutely peerless,” although she resigned from her prior role as Rhode Island’s chief medical examiner amid an audit that found her office let hundreds of incomplete autopsies languish under her watch, according to local reports from the time.
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She returned to the stand once jurors arrived, and she explained the internal injuries to O’Keefe’s brain and said pressure on the brain stem from internal swelling and bleeding as a result of the fracture is what killed him.
The cut over his right eye, however, was caused by a different impact. She said it did not appear to have been inflicted by the spoiler on the back of Read’s SUV.