From that article:
“Above all else, a totalizing drinking culture is what both defined and obscured this unresolved, perhaps irresolvable case. It opens the elevator shaft onto a bottomless enigma. Did Read—who allegedly woke up thinking she’d last seen O’Keefe at a bar—ever piece together any reliable memory shards from that night? Or did her mutating account of events generate itself from a primordial soup of liquor, panic, guilt, and conjecture? Did visitors to Fairview Road miss O’Keefe’s body on the lawn because it wasn’t there, or because they were too drunk to notice? Do any of these people really remember what happened?
Even under ideal circumstances, memories aren’t retrieved, exactly, so much as they are reconstructed. (Like a car crash, you might say.) The blackout drinker, it follows, has no materials to build with. Blackouts occur when alcohol interferes with receptors of the hippocampus that aid in memory consolidation, rendering the drinker incapable of making and storing new memories. She can be an engine of a narrative, but she cannot tell the story. Others may know her (provided they are not also blackout drinking), but she cannot know herself; she is absent from her own consciousness.”
Add to the above the snow, and the egregious incompetence of the ieve we will be left forever in the dark about the truth of what happened that night.
My heart aches for John O’Keefe’s family. To lose two children, or two siblings…and then go through the spectacle and harassment of crazy internet bloggers in this whole ordeal…If I were Paul, I would be angry too. I can see how he can interpret Karen Read’s attitude and demeanor as her enjoying her celebrity, and be infuriated by it. It would just be the final straw because he 100 percent believes she killed her brother, even if many of us don’t or even if we think it’s possible she did, but do not believe it was proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
It’s all just such a horrible tragedy.