A hearing to determine whether the defense can use their preferred dog bite expert in the second trial of Karen Read took place in a marathon session that more resembled a trial day than a typical motion hearing. It will continue into a second day.
“Those wounds were inflicted by a dog attack,” Dr. Marie Russell said as she examined a photo of the arm of John O’Keefe, Read’s alleged victim, during a hearing on her qualifications Thursday at Norfolk Superior Court in Dedham.
“Do you hold that opinion to a reasonable degree of medical certainty?” defense attorney Robert Alessi asked as his follow-up.
“Yes,” Russell responded. “I went over it with my many years of experience in wounds, and dog bites in particular … and that’s how I came to that opinion.”
The hearing to requalify Russell, who testified to the same opinion during the first trial that ended in the summer with a hung jury, clearly went longer than observers, and even those participating, predicted.
“Clearly we’re going to have to come back another day,” Judge Beverly Cannone said at the top of the sixth hour of the day and the fifth of active court. Special prosecutor Hank Brennan, who brought the challenge, had yet to get a chance to question the witness. The hearing is scheduled to resume on Jan. 7.
Alessi over the course of nearly 5 hours, in his first major showing since joining the now-four attorney defense team late last month, guided Russell through testimony detailing her career, qualifications and, in granular detail, her professional opinions on the case.
Russell, a retired emergency room doctor at a Los Angeles-area hospital ranked in the top tier for trauma cases as well as a forensic pathologist and medical examiner, testified that it was her professional opinion that the wounds to Keefe’s body, and the related holes and tears in the clothing he wore on Jan. 29, 2022, the morning of his death, were caused by dog bites.
She further rejected that the wounds could be caused by a motor vehicle collision, which is how the prosecution says Read killed O’Keefe, saying that none of them follow the typical patterns of a motor vehicle strike. At trial, the defense had three other experts who also concluded that O’Keefe’s wounds couldn’t have come from a motor vehicle strike.
Prosecutors say that Read, 44, of Mansfield, struck O’Keefe with her Lexus SUV following a night of drinking and yet another argument in their fraught two-year relationship and left him to freeze and die on the front lawn of 34 Fairview Road in Canton, where the pair were supposed to participate in an after party after the bars in town had closed. She faces charges of second-degree murder, motor vehicle manslaughter while operating under the influence, and leaving the scene of an accident causing death.
The defense countered with their own theory of the case, positing that not only is Read innocent but that others are responsible for O’Keefe’s murder.
One theory they hinted at in the trial is that people inside the home, possibly including then-homeowner Brian Albert, a fellow Boston cop, beat O’Keefe to death and then used their influence in town to frame Read. They also said that Albert’s dog, a German shepherd named Chloe, participated in the attack — pointing toward wounds on his arm that Russell testified were dog bites.
Brennan finally got to begin the questioning of the witness he has challenged since his first courtroom appearance on Nov. 13 in the last hour of the court day.
Brennan wrote in a motion formally challenging Russell that the defense had “failed to prove that Dr. Russell is a qualified expert in the field of canine bites or claw marks, veterinary medical science, forensic odontology, or canine behaviors” and that her testimony “cannot be reliably applied to facts.” He further said she shouldn’t have been qualified to testify in the first trial, and that’s an opinion he put forward in rapid questioning.
“Other than this trial earlier this year, have you ever been qualified in any court as a dog bite expert?” Brennan asked.
“No. It’s never come up,” she responded.
Brennan challenged Russell on all aspects of her qualifications from the minute — she doesn’t list any specific dog bite experience other than listing her two peer-reviewed articles on the subject in her curriculum vitae — to the philosophical.
“Just because you’ve seen thousands of broken bones, that doesn’t make you an expert in orthopedics, does it?” Brennan said.
“No,” she responded and, upon further questioning in this track, added, “I have not ordained myself as an expert in orthopedics. I have expertise.”
