–Spoiler: There will be scenes of pure, undiluted Massholery ahead.
Virtually every woman who’s taken the stand so far is a side character inThe Fighter.
–Let me begin this with some important housekeeping.
I’m told they never worked together.
They knew of each other and were cordial, but never friends.
Their connection was that Albert’s sister-in-law Jennifer McCabe was friends with O’Keefe and the defendant, Karen Read.
I have no intention of mischaracterizing anyone’s relationship in any this, and that’s on me.
I own that and will keep working to get it right.
You don’t have to have been part of our audience for long to understand it definitely isn’t.
But this trial has struck a nerve unlike any of it’s kind in my lifetime as a Masshole.
But there’s a lot to get through first.
–On one more personal note, I have this …
I guess I’ll call it a tin ear … for other people’s verbal tics.
Once I hear it, I can’t unhear it and it makes me loco.
And it only gets worse if you’re hearing it for days on end like this jury is.
It was like a meditation mantra.
Except unnerving as all hell to listen to.
Which happened three times a sentence.
As in, “What if anything did you observe?”
Including an actual question of “Who if anyone was driving the ambulance?”
As if Canton, MA has made a huge investment in self-driving emergency vehicle technology.
They didn’t volunteer for this; they were drafted.
–The unquestioned headliner of this week has been Jennifer McCabe.
In the most literal sense:
Her testimony has been appointment television.
Regardless on where you stand on her levels of truthfulness and consistency.
McCabes' week actually began Friday on direct examination, as she described the night Officer O’Keefe died.
It would be like he was calling an entirely different game.
I defy anyone to see in this video any of the things McCabe is describing.
–McCabe is significant - I’ll even say crucial - to the prosecution for several reasons.
Taken them in no particular order, she has Read saying “I hit him!”
over and over again.
Which is to say, she did on Friday in direct examination by the Commonwealth.
But as the defense hammered her with over and over again, she had never said so before.
Namely, what page of the Grand Jury transcript was he referring to.
To the point where Atty.
Alan Jackson threw up his hands and said, “Oh my goodness, Ms. McCabe!
It was five minutes ago!”
She then proceeds to call his again,seven more times.
All within the span of a few minutes.
If you’re on her side, you buy her explanation.
(As a side note, the internet has pointed out that teams tryouts were long since over.)
With the defendant screaming in her ear to find out what she can about hypothermia.
Jackson then accused McCabe of making other, similarly misspelled Google searches to hide her tracks.
And made McCabe a sympathetic figure in the eyes of the jury.
A friend of mine who’s a trial attorney himself called it “a game changer.”
–But from there, the claws came right back out.
Laura is the mother of O’Keefe’s godchild.
But relationships among these people is never all that simple.
For starters, there’s aMean Girlselement at play here.
Other than to address the very important point that they were nowhere near Canton on January 29th, 2022.
Yet still, the State Police investigators met with both of them within 10 days of O’Keefe’s death.
Implying that the focus of the investigation was to establish a motive and nothing else.
If he says anything earth-shattering, I’ll update this.
But apparently Tuesday is the only day the court will be in session next week.
So there’ll be plenty of time to catch up.
Rest in peace, Officer O’Keefe.
