34 Fairview Road, Canton, MA 02021
Author: Jewls Krueger
On the snowy morning of January 29, 2022, Boston police officer John O'Keefe was found unresponsive in the front yard of a home on Fairview Road in Canton, Massachusetts. He was pronounced dead a short time later, with injuries to his head, arm, and eye, and a body temperature far below normal.
Prosecutors charged O'Keefe's girlfriend Karen Read with hitting him with her SUV during a blackout drunk argument and leaving him to die in the cold. Read maintained she was innocent and that O'Keefe had been beaten inside the home and dragged outside. After two highly publicized trials and three and a half years of national attention, a jury acquitted Read of the most serious charges in June 2025, leaving the official cause of O'Keefe's death an enduring source of dispute.
John Joseph O'Keefe Jr. was born in 1975 in Boston and grew up in the city's Dorchester neighborhood. He joined the Boston Police Department in 1999 and worked his way up to a position in the department's K-9 unit. In 2013, O'Keefe took custody of his late sister's two young children after she and her husband died within a year of each other, raising the children in his Canton home.
Karen Read, born in 1980, was a former financial analyst at Fidelity Investments and an adjunct finance professor at Bentley University. She and O'Keefe began dating in 2020 and were in a committed relationship at the time of his death. The two had been planning a vacation to Aruba and had a key to each other's homes.
The home where O'Keefe was found dead, 34 Fairview Road in Canton, Massachusetts, was at the time owned by Brian Albert, a now retired Boston Police sergeant. The house sat on a corner lot in a quiet, residential section of Canton, a suburb about 20 miles south of Boston. On the night of January 28, 2022, Albert was hosting an informal after hours gathering of police and family friends at the home.
On the evening of January 28, 2022, Karen Read and John O'Keefe went out to drink with friends, first at the Waterfall Bar and Grille and then at C.F. McCarthy's, both in Canton. Around midnight, Brian Albert and his sister in law Jennifer McCabe invited the group back to the Fairview Road home to keep drinking.
What happened over the next hour and a half remains the central disputed fact of the case.
Read and O'Keefe drove together to the Albert home in Read's black 2021 Lexus LX 570 SUV, arriving around 12:30 a.m. According to prosecutors, after they pulled up in front of the home, Read backed up into O'Keefe at high speed in an alcohol fueled rage, knocking him to the ground, then fled the scene. Heavy snow fell over the next several hours, eventually covering his body. Around 5 a.m., Read, accompanied by Jennifer McCabe and a friend, returned to the Fairview Road home to look for O'Keefe and found him in the snow in the front yard. He was rushed to Good Samaritan Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.
Further Reading
Read's defense team argued that O'Keefe had actually entered the Albert home, been beaten and bitten by an Albert family dog during an altercation, and then been dragged outside and left to die in the snow. Defense lawyers pointed to issues with the investigation, including the fact that lead investigator Massachusetts State Trooper Michael Proctor was later fired from the State Police for misconduct related to his handling of the case, including sending vulgar texts about Read to colleagues.
Karen Read was first indicted on June 9, 2022 and charged with second degree murder, motor vehicle manslaughter while operating under the influence, and leaving the scene of a collision causing injury or death.
Her first trial began on April 16, 2024 in Norfolk Superior Court in Dedham, Massachusetts and lasted approximately nine weeks. On July 1, 2024, after five days of deliberation, the judge declared a mistrial when the jury was unable to reach a unanimous verdict. Several jurors later told reporters they had voted unanimously to acquit Read of the two most serious charges but had been deadlocked on the lesser manslaughter count.
The Commonwealth appointed special prosecutor Hank Brennan for the retrial, which began on April 14, 2025. The retrial again lasted approximately eight weeks. On June 18, 2025, after roughly 22 hours of deliberation, the jury found Karen Read not guilty of second degree murder, not guilty of motor vehicle manslaughter while under the influence, and not guilty of leaving the scene of a collision causing death. The jury did find her guilty of the lesser misdemeanor charge of operating a vehicle under the influence of alcohol. Read was sentenced to one year of probation and required to complete a state alcohol education program.
A wrongful death civil lawsuit filed by O'Keefe's family against Read and the bars that served the couple the night before O'Keefe's death is still pending.
The home at 34 Fairview Road remains a private residence on a quiet residential corner in Canton, Massachusetts. The Albert family, who owned the home in 2022, sold the property in October 2023 amid the intense public attention generated by the case. The new owners have no connection to the events of January 2022.
The yard where John O'Keefe was found has continued to draw a steady stream of true crime tourists, journalists, and "Free Karen Read" supporters since the case became national news. Please be respectful of the current owners and the surrounding neighborhood, stay on public roads and walkways, and do not approach the home or trespass under any circumstances.
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