John O’Keefe’s ex-girlfriend supports the accused

The ex-girlfriend of Boston police officer John O’Keefe has struck up a friendship with his accused killer Karen Read, as she believes the allegations against the accused do not add up.

NBC’s “The Night of the Nor’easter” Dateline special on Friday night highlighted the friendship of O’Keefe’s previous girlfriend, Lindsay Higgins, and Read.

Higgins and O’Keefe met through mutual friends in 2018 and dated for about six months.

“He was like a magnet,” Higgins said of O’Keefe. “Everybody wanted to be around him and hang out with him. He was very kind, very generous, always the first to pick up a bill or help someone.”

Higgins said he checked into an Airbnb in Florida, with his phone “ringing off the hook” before learning from a friend that O’Keefe had died on the morning of January 29, 2022.

Read, 44, of Mansfield, is accused of hitting O’Keefe, her boyfriend of two years and a 16-year-old Boston police officer, with her car and leaving him to die in a large snow storm on the front lawn of 34 Fairview Rd. , in Canton, a property that O’Keefe’s BPD colleague Brian Albert owned at the time.

After attending O’Keefe’s funeral and following developments in the case, Higgins said he received copies of court documents to understand more about what happened.

“I read everything … and I’m like, ‘Nothing here makes sense,'” Higgins said

“I’m thinking about all these accusations that she attacked him,” he added. “I’m just imagining it, I’m playing the scene in my head over and over. … Nothing added up.

Defense attorneys countered that outside actors killed O’Keefe and conspired with state and local police to frame Read for her murder.

Read has pleaded not guilty and a trial on charges of second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating a motor vehicle under the influence and leaving the scene of a fatal accident ended in a mistrial when jurors they indicated they were blocked.

His lawyers are asking that only the involuntary manslaughter charge remain in the new trial in January.

Higgins said she wrote a message to Read on Facebook, introducing herself, noting how she used to date O’Keefe, believes Read didn’t kill O’Keefe and supports her.

“I’ve thought about you a lot over the past year and my heart breaks for you,” read part of the message included in the Dateline special. “I’ve tried to put myself in your shoes and I can’t even imagine the pain, sadness, loneliness, anger and abandonment you must feel. I just want to give you the biggest hug!”

“She wrote me back,” Higgins said of Read. “Since then, we’ve gotten closer and closer.”

In an interview with Dateline, Read explained how he dropped off O’Keefe at 34 Fairview Rd. in Canton for a house party after a night of drinking with his police buddies. He said he saw him go into the house while he waited outside in his SUV in case O’Keefe came back and told him to get in.

“He didn’t come back,” Read said in the interview, “and it pissed me off, because one, I didn’t want to be there, and two, I had to go to the bathroom.”

Read says she finally decided to leave and when she returned to O’Keefe’s house, she called him about 50 times, but he never returned. Hours later, Read woke up around 4 a.m. and O’Keefe was not home.

“I didn’t know what the hell happened,” Read said. “How did the night end like this?”

After O’Keefe was frantically found unconscious outside 34 Fairview Rd., around 6 a.m., Read detailed how she was placed “under psychiatric observation just two halls down from where they worked on the body of John” at Good Samaritan Medical Center in Brockton.

Medical personnel pronounced O’Keefe dead at about 7:50 that morning, and a medical examiner later ruled the cause of death as “blunt force head injuries and hypothermia.”

“Then finally, just before noon, my dad walks into the room I’m in. And I said, ‘Dad… how’s he doing? And he said, ‘He’s gone. John’s gone gone, Karen. And I fell to the ground.”

Higgins emphasized how he has attended Read’s hearings. His first appearance to support Read was in May 2023.

“I tried to save his life,” Read told reporters on the courthouse steps after that hearing. “I tried to save his life at 6 in the morning. He was covered in his blood. I was the only one trying to save his life.”