One day after the Massachusetts State Police Trooper Michael Proctor, lead investigator in the Karen Read case, was relieved of duty, a police union official said, “we do not condone” what Proctor wrote about Read in text messages.
Read, 44, of Mansfield, was charged with the January 2022 murder of her Boston police officer boyfriend John O’Keefe, 46, who police say she hit with her car after a night of drinking.
The State Police Association of Massachusetts announced its hope that “justice will be served” for O’Keefe’s family to receive “the closure they deserve,” according to a statement from Brian Williams, association president.
“This trial shined a bright light on our judicial process and the nuances of legal proceedings,” Williams said. “It also blurred the lines between fact and innuendo presented during the defense of the accused.”
The statement then addressed how “the focus has shifted to yesterday’s disciplinary action taken against Trooper Michael Proctor.” During his testimony in the trial, Proctor admitted to sending text messages where he described Read in a degrading manner and told his sister, “Hopefully [Read] kills herself” and called her a “whack job.”
“It is our understanding that this discipline came as a result of the trooper’s private text message exchanges that were made public during the trial,” Williams said in his statement. “We also understand that it has no relationship to salacious allegations of cover-ups, collusion or conspiracies offered by the defense … we must be clear that we do not condone the language used in text messages presented as evidence during the trial.”
After five days of jury deliberations, Norfolk County Superior Court Judge Beverly Cannone declared a mistrial in Read’s case when jurors said they could not reach a verdict.
On Tuesday, Gov. Maura Healey said she backed the State Police decision to relieve Proctor of duty and called it the “right decision.”
“This was the right move to remove him,” Healey said, according to The Boston Globe. “There’s no tolerance for that behavior, frankly, with anyone in law enforcement, with anyone in public service.”
