A mistrial was declared in the case of Karen Read, a Massachusetts woman accused of killing her police officer boyfriend, after a jury failed to agree on a verdict.

Read, 44, maintained that she did not kill her boyfriend, but that he was killed by fellow Boston police officers who then framed her. A jury couldn’t come to a conclusion one way or the other after five days of deliberation, the Associated Press reported, so Judge Beverly Cannone declared a mistrial.

Prosecutors have said they intend to retry the case.

John O’Keefe was a Boston police officer who lived in Canton, MA, since 2014 to raise his niece and nephew, who had been orphaned after O’Keefe’s sister died of a brain tumor and her husband died of a heart attack shortly after. Read, an adjunct professor at Bentley University, lived in Mansfield, MA, but had been dating O’Keefe since 2020 and regularly staying in Canton to help O’Keefe with the children, Boston Magazine reported.

On January 28, 2022, Read and O’Keefe traveled to the Waterfall Bar & Grille in Canton after drinking at another pub. At the Waterfall, O’Keefe saw some of his friends and joined them with Read in tow. Chris Albert, O’Keefe’s neighbor and the town selectman, along with Chris’ brother Brian, another Boston Police Department officer, and Jennifer McCabe, Brian’s sister-in-law.

The five chatted and drank until midnight, when the bar was about to close and Brian suggested they all go to his house. O’Keefe wanted to go, but Read was tired and tipsy and unsure about continuing the party. She agreed to at least drive O’Keefe to Brian’s house. After dropping him off, she decided to go home, but said that she woke up alone at 4:30 a.m. and worried about where her boyfriend was. She didn’t have McCabe’s number, so she woke up O’Keefe’s then 14-year-old niece to ask her to call McCabe’s daughter, with whom she was friends. McCabe said she didn’t know where O’Keefe was, and called Chris Albert’s wife to see if O’Keefe had passed out at their house, but she said he hadn’t. At the same time, Read called O’Keefe’s friend Kerry Roberts, who also had not seen O’Keefe.

Read, McCabe, and Roberts met up to look for O’Keefe, with Read in the backseat of Roberts’ car screaming about how O’Keefe was missing, Boston Magazine reported. A blizzard had rolled through town the night before, and it was still snowing as the women drove in the darkness.

They drove to Brian Albert’s home, and Read immediately said she saw O’Keefe and jumped out of the car to rush to his side, even though it was completely dark outside. O’Keefe was lying in the snow, ice-cold, and Read began performing CPR. He had blood on his face and two black eyes, while his hat and shoes were missing. McCabe brought blankets to warm him up and called 911. It was 6:04 a.m.

Read cried and repeatedly asked if she had hit O’Keefe. An ambulance took O’Keefe to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 7:50 a.m.

Read was soon arrested and taken to jail, charged with manslaughter for allegedly hitting O’Keefe with her Lexus when she dropped him off at Brian’s house. The original charges stemmed from the belief that Read accidentally hit O’Keefe with her car.

But four months later, the charges were increased to second-degree murder. Part of the change came from the allegation that Read admitted to hitting O’Keefe on the morning she found him, which was overheard by first responders and police.

Read told ABC News last year, however, that she was questioning whether she could have hit him by accident.

“I said, ‘I hit him’? It was preceded by a ‘Did,’ and preceded by a question mark,” she said. “What I thought could have happened was that, did I incapacitate him unwittingly, somehow, and then in his drunkenness [he] passed out?”

Read’s attorney, David Yannetti, reviewed the charging documents with her and questioned whether Read really could have caused all the injuries to O’Keefe just by backing into him with her car. A medical examiner found that O’Keefe had abrasions on his right arm, two black eyes, along with cuts on his face, and a laceration to the back of his head, CNN reported. He also had several skull fractures.

Police found red and clear bits of plastic near O’Keefe’s body, consistent with Read’s broken taillight. When police seized the vehicle, they found damage to the right rear tailgate.

This information led police to believe Read was intoxicated and backed into O’Keefe before driving away.

Soon, a tipster called Read’s attorney, Yannetti, and claimed that O’Keefe was “beaten up by Brian Albert and his nephew.”

“They broke his nose, and when O’Keefe didn’t come to, Brian and a federal agent dumped his body on the front lawn,” the tipster added, Yannetti told Boston Magazine.

An attorney for that tipster, however, denied Yannetti’s version of the tip to the outlet.

After this call, Yannetti and Read began looking into whether O’Keefe could have been killed at the party and left out in the cold to die. Read then learned that the lead detective on the case, State Trooper Michael Proctor, was friends with the Albert family.

Read already believed O’Keefe was actually beaten up at the party, but now she believed Proctor was helping to frame her, including an alleged period where Proctor had access to Read’s vehicle and may have planted evidence.

Read hired another attorney – famous criminal defense attorney Alan Jackson, who had once represented Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey.

With Jackson’s help, the defense’s theory was able to sway enough jurors to question whether she was actually guilty.