Karen Read was allegedly overheard uttering “I hit him, I hit him, I hit him” after finding her Boston cop boyfriend dead in the snow, a key witness testified Wednesday.
The witness, Jennifer McCabe, told jurors she heard her crazed friend making the alleged admission to a first responder at some point after they found John O’Keefe’s body on Jan. 29, 2022.
McCabe, who was with Read at the time and was the one who called 911, said she interrupted her friend because “I thought she was talking crazy.”
“Karen was hysterical, irrational,” McCabe testified in the Dedham, Massachusetts, courtroom.
“She’s doing a lot of screaming, asking ‘is he dead, is he dead, is he dead?’ She just was kind of all over the place.”
McCabe returned to the stand under cross examination in the sensational murder trial Wednesday — a day after she testified that her friend also kept asking “Did I hit him?” and “Could I have hit him?”
Prosecutors allege Read, 45, backed into O’Keefe, 46, with her Lexus SUV after a night of drinking at a friend’s home in Canton — and then left him to die as a snowstorm approached.
After receiving a hysterical call from Read around 5:30 a.m. the morning after, McCabe told jurors that she, Read and a third woman, Kerry Roberts, drove together to the home in search of the Boston cop.
McCabe said she immediately called 911 after Read spotted her boyfriend and started screaming as she wiped snow from his frozen face.
During the 911 call, which was played in court Wednesday, Read could be heard making noise in the background as McCabe tried to speak with the dispatcher.
“I don’t know,” McCabe could be heard saying when asked how long O’Keefe had been outside in the cold.
“I think he’s passed away,” she then said, according to the audio.
Asked how she was feeling at the time, McCabe testified: “I was in shock.”
“My heart was racing. I was trying to be as helpful as I could and get the most important information out as quick as I could to the 911 operators but also the scene there with Karen and Kerry was a bit chaotic between the two of them, so I was just trying my best to be as calm as I could to get help there as quickly as I could,” she said.
Doubling down on her prior testimony, McCabe recalled the moments first responders started arriving on scene – noting that Read was “running around crazy … just yelling and screaming.”
At one point, an officer suggested Read take a seat in one of the police cruisers to calm down, McCabe said.
McCabe told jurors she got in the car, too, to comfort her friend.
It was then that Read asked McCabe to Google hypothermia and how long it takes for someone to die in the cold.
At that point, McCabe made the now-infamous web search: “hos long to die in cold?”
Read’s lawyers have argued that McCabe’s Google search happened hours before O’Keefe was discovered, which could implicate her rather than Read.
They claim Read was targeted as scapegoat in a law enforcement cover-up and have suggested that O’Keefe was killed by someone inside the home where his girlfriend says she dropped him off.
McCabe also testified for three days at Read’s first trial last year, which ended in a mistrial.
Read’s second trial on charges of second-degree murder, manslaughter and leaving the scene, began April 22.
