The Telltale Taillight

How the reconstruction of Karen Read's taillight from fragments found in front of 34 Fairview over a 3-week period may have inadvertently boosted the defense's case.

The right rear passenger taillight of Karen Read’s Lexus SUV is one of the most important pieces of evidence in the case. According to the Commonwealth’s theory, the taillight shattered when Karen struck John O’Keefe at 12:30 in the morning on January 29, 2022 in front of Brian Albert’s house. A forensic scientist has testified that she was able to fit multiple pieces of recovered plastic together and match them to the taillight housing that was removed from Karen’s car.

So far, the taillight is the only evidence that would strongly tend to tie Karen Read to some kind of collision in the area where John was found. But the taillight is also central to the defense theory that Karen Read was framed. According to the defense, it was only after lead investigator Trooper Michael Proctor seized Karen’s car that taillight pieces began to be found in the snow at 34 Fairview.

You would think that in a case involving a dead police officer, law enforcement would have pulled out all the stops and conducted their investigation completely by the book to ensure the perpetrator is brought to justice. But that hasn’t been the case. From collecting biological evidence in red Solo cups in a Stop and Shop grocery bag to storing critical items of evidence at the conflicted Canton Police Department to failing to separate witnesses before interviewing them, one misstep after another forces us to ask whether this is merely the sloppiest death investigation in history or, as the defense alleges, something more nefarious.

How police recovered and pieced back together Karen Read’s taillight from fragments found over the course of three weeks in front of 34 Fairview may hold the key to answering this question.

1. The taillight reconstruction is critical because the photographic evidence isn’t definitive.

Karen’s SUV has been captured on multiple cameras:

• Ring camera at John O’Keefe’s house on January 28th before the incident, the following morning when she left to go look for him (at which point the rear passenger taillight area of her SUV struck John’s SUV, causing it to move), and later in the day after she returned from the hospital;

• Dashcam footage from Canton police officer Charles Rae’s patrol car from about 8:30 in the morning on January 29th when he conducted a wellness check on the children at John O’Keefe’s house;

• Ring camera footage from the home of Karen Read’s parents in Dighton, Massachusetts when Troopers Proctor and Bukhenik seized the SUV and towed it back to the Canton Police Department, where they arrived about 5:30 p.m. on January 29th;

• Surveillance footage from the Canton Police Department sallyport when the SUV arrived (which was inexplicably mirrored so that the side facing the camera appeared to be the passenger’s side when it was actually the driver’s side); and

• Photographs taken when agents from the Massachusetts Police crime lab went to the Canton Police Department sallyport to inspect the SUV and collect evidence from it on February 1, 2022.

Of all of this photographic evidence, the only piece that unequivocally shows a broken passenger taillight is the final photograph taken after the SUV had already been in the sallyport for three days.

The remaining videos are ambiguous at best and can likely be interpreted to show whatever the viewer expects to see in them. And this is unfortunate, because the ambiguity could have been definitively dispelled had Troopers Proctor or Bukhenik simply taken a photograph of the SUV when they saw it in the driveway at Karen’s parents’ house or when they loaded it onto the tow truck. Whether this was simply another instance of horrendously negligent investigative decision-making or proof of a frame job is a question we shouldn’t have to be asking because had the Commonwealth’s lead investigators taken the basic step of photographically confirming what they saw when they say they saw it, it would have entirely disproven the defense’s theory that the taillight was not broken until after they seized it. Since they didn’t, we can’t rule out the defense’s theory that they broke the taillight after that and planted the pieces to frame her.

Still, for the defense theory to work, we have to account for how the taillight pieces got from her SUV to 34 Fairview in time for police to find them. If police found portions of her taillight at 34 Fairview before they feasibly could have been planted there, then that would strongly tend to rule out the defense theory of a frame job and support the Commonwealth’s theory that the taillight pieces were left on the scene when Karen backed into John. The timing, as David Yanetti told us in opening, is important.

2. How the searches uncovered the plastic pieces.

Initially, when Canton Police officers Paul Gallagher, Shawn Goode, and Michael Lank searched the area where John was found around 7:30 that morning by using a leaf blower to clear away the snow that had accumulated beginning around midnight, they uncovered a broken cocktail glass but no pieces of taillight plastic. This fact supports the defense theory, since the first responders had control of the scene from minutes after Karen Read, Jen McCabe, and Kerry Roberts found John unresponsive on the front lawn of 34 Fairview at about 6 a.m. until they left the scene at around 7:45. As shown in dashcam video and photographs taken during the initial police response, only a few inches of snow had accumulated at this point but a considerable amount of snow would continue to fall throughout the day, burying the scene and its contents. Although this initial search was arguably the best opportunity to quickly recover pieces of taillight if any were present, none were found at that time.

However, multiple subsequent searches of the property uncovered pieces of taillight, beginning with the Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) of the Massachusetts State Police who began to arrive at the scene shortly before 5 p.m. on January 29th. Then on February 3rd, Trooper Yuriy Bukhenik and Trooper David DiCicco searched the area again and recovered several more pieces of taillight, and additional searches on February 4th, 8th, 10th, 11th, and 18th continued to be fruitful because, according to law enforcement, more taillight pieces became exposed as the snow that fell throughout the day on January 29th melted over the following weeks. These pieces were later delivered to the Massachusetts State Police crime lab, where forensic scientist Ashley Vallier was then able to fit some of these various plastic pieces back together and match them to Karen’s taillight housing.

This timing would seem to rule out the frame-up theory because, according to the sallyport video, Troopers Proctor and Bukhenik did not arrive at the Canton Police Department with Karen Read’s SUV until about 5:30 p.m. but CERT officers were already arriving on scene to conduct their search half an hour before that. And according to Lt. Kevin O’Hara, CERT recovered 6 or 7 pieces of red and clear plastic during their search, during which time multiple officers were present but Troopers Proctor and Bukhenik were never on scene. Under this scenario, then, Troopers Proctor and/or Bukhenik could not have planted the taillight pieces that the CERT team recovered.

But there’s a problem - we can’t say for sure that the pieces of plastic CERT recovered from the scene were ultimately matched to Karen’s taillight. If the plastic they found was not from her taillight, then we still can’t foreclose the possibility that Troopers Proctor and/or Bukhenik planted the pieces from Karen’s taillight after seizing her SUV and then “discovered” them in subsequent searches. In this scenario, the frame theory would simply require that somebody - perhaps Brian Albert or Brian Higgins, with the help of his plow - planted *some* pieces of plastic taillight from any source to give the CERT team something to find and to buy time until the real pieces could be planted. Since the scene at 34 Fairvew was unsecured from the time that the first responders left around 7:45 a.m. until the CERT team returned close to 5:00 p.m. and began their search at about 5:45 p.m., there would be plenty of time for the “false flag” taillight pieces to be planted.

3. The chain of custody doesn’t establish that the CERT pieces were matched to Karen’s taillight.

To answer the question whether any of the 6-7 pieces CERT recovered were ultimately matched to Karen’s taillight, we need to closely examine the work of forensic scientist Ashley Vallier. According to Ms. Vallier, the taillight pieces were bagged as 9 separate items, which her lab labeled as Item numbers 7-5, 7-6, 7-8, 7-10, 7-11, 7-12, 7-13, 7-15, and 7-16. She was able to match pieces from each item to the taillight housing from Karen Read’s SUV.

Here’s the problem: None of the evidence bags in which these items were contained appear to have been sealed or logged into evidence before February 4th. Here are the evidence bags containing each of the 9 items:

Sooooo … where are the CERT pieces collected on January 29th? According to Lt. O’Hara’s testimony, Lt. Brian Tully was in charge of documenting and collecting the evidence recovered during that search. According to Trooper Bukhenik’s testimony, evidence once collected is sealed with evidence tape and initialed with the date, then logged into the evidence system where only a few people have access to it. So we should expect Lt. Tully to have sealed, initialed, and logged the 6-7 plastic pieces into evidence on January 29th - yet the evidence submitted to the crime lab for analysis includes no indication that he did.

There are a few possible ways to interpret this state of affairs:

1. None of the material Lt. Tully collected was sent to the lab or matched to Karen’s taillight;

2. Lt. Tully violated protocol and did not log the evidence recovered from the January 29 search until six days afterward; that evidence was then submitted to the lab with a February 4, 2022 label; or

3. Lt. Tully violated protocol by giving the evidence to somebody else (Trooper Proctor, perhaps?), who logged it into evidence six days later on February 4, 2022.

The best case scenario for the Commonwealth is that Lt. Tully’s failure to properly log the evidence after securing it left the taillight pieces recovered on January 29th unaccounted for over a six-day period. In other words, once again, evidence that could have thoroughly disproven the defense theory instead leaves that door open because of, at best, inexplicably negligent mishandling by senior law enforcement investigators.

4. Where do we go from here?

This hole in the chain of custody of the plastic pieces recovered on January 29th means that Lt. Tully’s testimony will be critical if the frame-job theory is to be ruled out. Since he was in charge of the pieces, he will need to account for them. Are they missing? Did he eventually log them into evidence, or did someone else? Where were they at in the meantime and why? And if they were one or more of the items labeled February 4, 2022, which ones were they and why was it Trooper David DiCicco that apparently sealed them? Incidentally, why is Trooper DiCicco sealing items on February 4th when according to Trooper Bukhenik, the follow-up search where he collected additional plastic pieces took place on February 3rd?

Evidence handling practices exist precisely so these kinds of questions about exactly what was discovered exactly when don’t arise. That these mistakes are being made not by rookies or rank-and-file officers but by high-ranking senior supervisors stinks to high heaven. Is it merely coincidental that the death investigation of a fellow police officer was plagued with so many very basic errors and lapses in judgment? I’m not prepared to have a final opinion on that question yet, but I’ll tell you this - if the taillight pieces from the CERT search turn out to have been accessible by Trooper Proctor in that six-day mystery period before they were logged, I’m going to have quite a hard time concluding the frame-up possibility has been disproven beyond a reasonable doubt.

All that law enforcement needed to do for their brother in blue was to conduct a clean investigation by the book and this entire theory of a frame-up would have been foreclosed before it could even be conceived. Plenty of critics continue to argue that the frame-up is an irresponsible fabrication by defense attorneys David Yanetti and Alan Jackson. But the fact that the frame-up is a feasible theory at all lies squarely at the feet of the investigators who gave it room to grow. And since such routine steps - photographing the taillight in Dighton at the time of the seizure and logging evidence at the time it’s recovered - were all that was needed to foreclose the theory, the failure to take those steps is all the more inexplicable. At a certain point, the simplest explanation for why so many basic mistakes make the case look like a frame-up is because it is one. And if it isn’t, those in charge of the investigation and the apparent culture of carelessness that is the best case scenario for the Commonwealth here bear the responsibility for allowing the theory to take root.