Karen Read was drunk; she reversed 74.5% throttle, up to 24mph, at the same time Officer John O’Keefe’s cell phone stopped moving. She then left him and phoned him within minutes to tell him she “f*cking hated him”.
The digital evidence provides a detailed timeline of what happened.
The SUV stopped by the flagpole at 12:24:38 a.m. John's phone then recorded no movement for approximately seven minutes.
At 12:31:56 a.m., a brief 20-second step event began. The cell phone briefly pinged the house for eight seconds while refining GPS accuracy, but the latitude and longitude did not change.
At 12:32:09 a.m., the phone recorded its last user interaction.
At 12:32:16 a.m., phone movement stopped.
Beginning at 12:33:14 a.m., 26,532 Doppler checks consistently registered a pocket state for more than five hours, indicating the phone remained stationary.
At 12:37 a.m., the battery temperature began to decline and continued dropping throughout the night, consistent with the phone being outside in cold conditions.
Welcher's report initially listed the reverse trigger event between 12:31:38 and 12:31:43 a.m., reflecting the unadjusted Lexus clock. Burgess testified that a Lexus clock and an iPhone clock can vary by as much as 60 seconds. While the Lexus clock is accurate to the minute, it is not synchronized to the second like an iPhone.
Burgess also discovered that the original vehicle extraction was incomplete, which he attributed to either an unintentional partial download or an overlooked chip. A second extraction was completed in the presence of both parties' experts.
To refine the timing, Burgess used multiple independent data points, including vehicle power-on and power-off events, odometer readings, Ring video footage, bar surveillance footage, Waze data from John O'Keefe's phone, and the three-point turn on the way to 34 Fairview. By correlating those datasets with the vehicle data, he narrowed the reverse maneuver to 12:32:04–12:32:12 a.m.
According to Whiffin, the phone's last user interaction occurred at 12:32:09 a.m., and movement stopped at 12:32:16 a.m.
Movement did not resume until 6:04:01 a.m., when Karen Read, Kerry Roberts, and Jen McCabe were performing CPR. The phone registered movement because it was underneath John O'Keefe.
After John was moved onto the stretcher and the phone was exposed, the device recorded its lowest temperature of the night, 37°F, at approximately 6:14 a.m.
At 6:15:01 a.m., Kerry Roberts was seen on police dash camera footage picking up the phone and the baby blankets. At the same time, the pocket-state cleared. Once the phone was placed in her pocket, the battery temperature began to rise. After she entered a warm vehicle, the temperature continued increasing.
Whiffin's opinion was not based on a single data point. He relied on the convergence of multiple independent data streams, including step data, Doppler pocket-state data, user interactions, battery temperature trends, and location data.
Whiffin concluded that John O'Keefe's phone never moved far from the flagpole area from shortly after 12:25 a.m. until it was recovered that morning. The phone's last user interaction occurred at 12:32:09 a.m., and movement stopped at 12:32:16 a.m.
Burgess's opinion was not based on a single dataset. He relied on multiple independent data sources, including vehicle telemetry (reverse triggers, throttle position, power cycle data), odometer readings, Ring camera footage, bar surveillance video, Waze navigation data from John O'Keefe's phone, and the three-point turn on the route to 34 Fairview.
Burgess concluded Karen Read’s SUV reversed between approximately 12:32:04 a.m. and 12:32:12 a.m.
All of those independent data sources pointed to the same conclusion.
“The data is the data.”