Detective says Karen Read was 'questioning' strike; Proctor text messages read in court

DEDHAM, Mass. — A primary investigator of the death of John O’Keefe testified that Karen Read was “questioning” hitting O’Keefe with her vehicle — a disclosure made on the same day that text messages that ruined another trooper’s career were read in court.

“We had statements from the defendant, she was questioning whether she had hit him,” Massachusetts State Police Sgt. Yuri Bukhenik testified Thursday, the 12th day of Read’s second trial for the murder of O’Keefe.

The testimony is in contrast to the declarative “I hit him” statement that first responders testified Read said shortly after she and two other women found O’Keefe dead or dying on the front lawn of 34 Fairview Road in Canton.

Defense attorneys had hammered those witnesses earlier in the trial by bringing up grand jury testimony in which witnesses testified to Read saying “Did I hit him?” or “Could I have hit him?” while emotional at the scene, but the witnesses stood by their trial testimony that Read repeatedly said “I hit him.”

Bukhenik, one of the two primary investigators in the case, is so essential that he was the only witness called Thursday and will return to the stand for a second day.

During his testimony, Bukhenik unsealed a number of pieces of physical evidence he said police found in the “general vicinity” of where O’Keefe was found. Bukhenik also narrated clips selected from the two bars Read, O’Keefe and others of concern in the case drank at in Canton before O’Keefe’s death.

While his own testimony is important, it was the damaging image of his investigative partner, the since-fired Trooper Michael Proctor, that led the defense’s cross examination.

Read, 45, of Mansfield faces charges of second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating a motor vehicle under the influence, and leaving the scene of a collision causing death.

Prosecutors say she struck John O’Keefe, a Boston cop she had dated for two years at the time, with her Lexus SUV and left him to freeze and die on the front lawn of 34 Fairview Road in Canton in the early morning of Jan. 29, 2022.

Bukhenik is a supervisor in the homicide division of the Norfolk DA’s office MSP unit, which has jurisdiction over homicide and unattended death investigations in the county. He testified that the case was assigned to his subordinate, Trooper Proctor, but that the pair worked together.

Proctor is a lightning rod for the case and plays a pivotal role in the defense’s theory of either a purposeful frame-job of their client or that the investigation was so biased that it might as well have been.

Proctor testified last year that he texted friends, and even co-workers and supervisors, that Read was a “whack job” and a “babe” as well as some more extreme language insulting the woman he was tasked with investigating. He also texted his sister that he hoped Read “kills herself.” The MSP put him on administrative leave immediately after last year’s mistrial and he has since been fired.

On the stand Thursday, Bukhenik read text messages Proctor sent to a text chain that included them both. Those were: “Funny, I’m going through his (rude word) client’s phone,” in reference to Read’s defense attorney; “No nudes so far,” in reference to examining Read’s own phone; and “I hate that man, I truly hate him,” once again in reference to Read’s original attorney, David Yannetti, who remains on the team.

Proctor was fired in March primarily for his behavior on the Read case. But he wasn’t the only one disciplined: the unit’s chief, Lt. Brian Tully, was reassigned and Bukhenik, Proctor’s direct supervisor, was stripped of five vacation days for lapses in his management of Proctor.

Defense attorney Alan Jackson seized on all of this in his cross examination. And while his questions were designed to make Bukhenik himself look bad and unprofessional, the questions stressed even further how much of the case Proctor was involved in.

Bukhenik refused to call Proctor the “lead investigator” of the case, saying that the term he would use is “case officer” and also said that with so many investigators on the case it wouldn’t be fair to say that Proctor had a “major role.”

Jackson followed that testimony up by having Bukhenik read a long series of police documents in the case all written by or referencing actions performed by Proctor, and had Bukhenik admit the documents he read were merely a small sampling.

But Bukhenik said that bias “did not affect any outcome of the investigation.”

“The investigation was done with honor, integrity, and all the evidence pointed in one direction and one direction only,” Bukhenik said.

Bukhenik presented a number of physical items to the jury. Those included pieces of taillight that prosecutors say prove Read struck O’Keefe as well as some glass from a broken cocktail glass. He also unsealed O’Keefe’s clothing at the time of death: blue jeans, a long-sleeved and hooded t-shirt, a baseball cap and a Nike shoe.

He also walked the jury through Read and O’Keefe’s visits to first C.F. McCarthy’s bar from 9:03 p.m. on Jan. 28, 2022, when Read arrived to meet up with O’Keefe through 10:53 p.m. when the pair walked across the street to the Waterfall Bar & Grille. Bukhenik said Read was served seven drinks inside McCarthy’s and even left with a cocktail glass full of booze. Next came surveillance footage from Waterfall, from a minute after the pair left McCarthy’s to around 12:10 a.m. when they headed out, along with a number of others. They were all going to 34 Fairview Road, the Albert family residence in Canton, according to previous testimony in the trial.