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Boston police officer John O’Keefe died on a cold January night in 2022. His snow-covered body was found outside a Canton home following a night of drinking at different bars with his girlfriend, Karen Read, who was charged with his murder. In the hoopla of Read’s trial, which ended on Monday in a mistrial after jurors were unable to reach a verdict, it was easy to forget that O’Keefe was the real victim of this sad story.

Instead, the pseudo-drama of Read as victim became a national sensation, as her defense team spun a complex web of conspiracy theories about how she was allegedly framed. That shift of focus — to defendant as victim — happens when cases “take on a life of their own,” said Dan Conley, a former Suffolk district attorney. He saw it happen when former New England Patriots player Aaron Hernandez faced murder charges in a Suffolk Superior courtroom in 2017 and his two victims “were essentially forgotten, lost in the trial,” he said.



In similar fashion, O’Keefe became a “bit player” in Read’s trial, Conley said. Imagine that. In death, a 36-year-old cop who was raising the two children of a sister who died was nothing more than a bit player in the spectacle that defined the Read trial.

My colleague Yvonne Abraham has also cited those two kids, now teenagers, as forgotten victims. It was Read — sporting a curated wardrobe of carefully tailored blazers and a small smile that often veered into a smirk — who was the superstar. Her fans, d.

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