Karen Read set to receive her SUV months after being cleared of murder

Lance Reynolds, Boston Herald on Sep 3, 2025

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BOSTON — Karen Read is set to have her car finally returned to her from the Massachusetts State Police, months after a jury cleared her of using the vehicle to kill her Boston Police officer boyfriend.

Read’s 2021 Lexus LX 570 SUV remained in the custody of the Massachusetts State Police as of Wednesday afternoon, but one of her attorneys has said that she will be receiving it sometime in the coming days.

“It’s a matter of working the logistics to get the vehicle picked up,” attorney Steven Boozang told Herald columnist Howie Carr on his radio show Wednesday.

“I can’t imagine that it’s in great condition having sat there for quite some time,” the attorney added, “but I think it can be put back together. We are hopeful that it will be.”

Boozang said he had spoken with Bill Brusard from JB Autocare in Weymouth, who told Carr last week that he agreed that he’d restore Read’s vehicle once the State Police let go of it.

This comes after Boozang made a motion earlier this summer for the SUV and Read’s personal cell phone to be returned. The attorney said he is also hopeful that the phone will soon have the same fate as the car.

One of Read’s other attorneys, Alan Jackson, said last week his client lost her career, her car, her house, and her own freedom for four years as the court proceedings played out.

The jury cleared Read of killing John O’Keefe, her boyfriend of two years at the time, in her retrial in June, only finding her guilty of drunken driving.

Prosecutors argued that the two-year relationship between Read and O’Keefe had become strained with jealousy and significant fighting, heightened by frequent alcohol use.

During both trials, prosecutors presented a case that in the early morning of Jan. 29, 2022, Read and O’Keefe got into an alcohol-fueled fight on their way to an after-party at a home in Canton and that Read backed her SUV up at great speed into O’Keefe and left him to freeze and die on a Canton front yard as a snowstorm raged across the region.

But the defense presented a different story: that Read was framed by corrupt local police and prosecutors for O’Keefe’s death and that the science proves O’Keefe was not killed by a vehicle strike.

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