At exactly 5 a.m. the next morning, Roberts said she was woken up by a call from Read, a minute or two after she had missed another call from Read.
“I answered the phone and she said, ‘John’s dead. Kerry, Kerry, Kerry,’ and then she hung up,” Roberts said. “[She was] very loud. She woke my husband, who was sleeping.”
Roberts said she tried to call Read back, but got no answer. After about five minutes, Read called again, and told Roberts she believed O’Keefe might be dead and may have been hit by a plow. According to Roberts, Read said O’Keefe would never leave his niece, who was home, alone, and she believed something was wrong.
“She said, ‘I’m driving, can I come to your house? Can you drive my car? I don’t remember anything from last night. I drank so much,” Roberts said, adding that she told Read to go home to be with O’Keefe’s niece and that she shouldn’t drive if she had been drinking.
Roberts agreed to help Read look for O’Keefe and went outside to wait in her car, where she called the police non-emergency line and Good Samaritan Hospital to see if there had been any car accidents the night before. Read called again to let her know she was going to McCabe’s home so Roberts drove to meet them. While they were on the phone, Roberts said she heard McCabe tell Read that Read had gone to the Alberts’ home at 34 Fairview Road the night before, and Read asked about her taillight, which Roberts saw was broken.
“There was a bit sticking out and I remember thinking someone was going to catch their sleeve on that or something,” she said.
Read wanted to go directly to Fairview Road but Roberts said they should check O’Keefe’s home “to see if he passed out somewhere” and drop off Read’s car, so they did that first. Roberts called O’Keefe a “neat freak” with a strict rule against wearing shoes in the house, and said that she and McCabe removed their shoes before going inside, but Read did not.
Roberts said they looked through the house and spoke to O’Keefe’s niece but did not find O’Keefe.
Roberts drove the three women to 34 Fairview Road while they looked for O’Keefe along the road, thinking he may have been walking home or been hit by a plow. Roberts said the blizzard made for “really bad driving” and that visibility was “very poor.”
When they arrived at the home, Read began shouting.
“All of a sudden Karen said, ‘There he is, there he is, let me the F out of this car,’ and started kicking the door,” Roberts said. “I looked over and I didn’t see anything and I looked at Jen and said, ‘She’s crazy.’ So I unlocked the door and she got out and ran over to a mound of snow.”
Speaking through tears, Roberts described realizing that the mound of snow was a body and running over, clearing the snow off his head and realizing it was O’Keefe. She said his entire body was covered in 3 to 4 inches of snow and he was bleeding from his nose and mouth and a cut on the back of his head.
Roberts said she told McCabe to call 911 and began performing CPR until EMTs arrived.
Roberts said O’Keefe’s cell phone was underneath his body so she put it in her pocket, but gave it to a first responder when they asked if she had it.
When O’Keefe was put into the ambulance, Roberts said she told Read EMTs were “working on him.”
“Karen grabbed the front of my jacket and screamed in my face and said, ‘Are they working on him? Is he alive? I said they wouldn’t be working on him if he was dead,” she said. “She started to pray. She had blood on her hands and she told us she got her period, so I think she was in a state of shock ... I said, ‘No, that’s not your blood, that’s John’s.”
Roberts called members of O’Keefe’s family to let them know what had happened and told his parents she would pick them up to go to the hospital. Read called Erin O’Keefe, John O’Keefe’s sister in law, and Roberts said Read told her that O’Keefe was dead, so Roberts grabbed the phone from Read and explained that he was not dead but had “been in an accident.”
A witness said Karen Read called her at 5 a.m. and told her, "John's dead" in 2022. Keep up with the latest trial updates here.
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