Prosecution stumbles early in Karen Read, Season 2

Adam Lally isn’t looking so bad now, is he?

At least he doesn’t after watching his replacement, Hank Brennan. Hammered Hank, the special prosecutor, came out of the gate Tuesday in the Karen Read retrial and immediately put a worldwide audience not just to sleep, but into a deep coma.

The whole first day was set up to have an EMT testify that Karen Read said, “I hit him! I hit him! I hit him!” a statement which he apparently didn’t recall hearing until days later when he was being interviewed by … Michael Proctor, the cone head “cancer” as defense lawyer Alan Jackson called him in his opening.

But the Pee Wee Herman-lookalike EMT was immediately blown out of the water. Karen Read’s lawyers have had nine months to pick apart the piss-poor prosecution in the first trial, and the pathetic arguments of the Commonwealth haven’t improved with age.

This trial is the double-jeopardy re-do for District Attorney Michael “Meatball” Morrissey. For reasons that we can only speculate on, he needs a conviction of Karen Read, despite the overwhelming reasonable doubt, and the two overruled acquittals by the first jury.

Hank Brennan’s first witness was, you have to surmise, his best witness. Timothy Nuttall, the EMT.

Nuttall didn’t seem very convincing, even on direct examination, before the cross-examination pointing out how his testimony has, you know, evolved.

Evolved, as in, “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.”

But this trial isn’t a prosecution, it’s a persecution. And since Mob mouthpiece Hank Brennan is only trying to save Meatball’s fat ass, the whole point with putting Nuttall up there was just to grab that opening-day headline:

“Karen Read to EMT: ‘I hit him! I hit him! I hit him.’”

Of course in his opening, defense attorney Alan Jackson had already told the jury that the supposed confession “never happened. At least 13 responders, and not one of them immediately reported having heard Karen Read say, ‘I hit him.’”

Then the cops played some videotape of the moment. The jury could hear Karen Read screaming “Jen! Jen!” But then, at the magic moment of where she allegedly confesses, the sound disappears.

“Not picked up on the audio?” Brennan asked.

“No sir,” Nuttall said.

Tough break for Whitey Bulger’s butt boy. But we can take their word for everything, right? You can trust them, they’re not like the others.

And pay no attention to the two bad words: Michael Proctor. The Karen Read team will be getting to him soon enough.

But Nuttall’s testimony had other inconsistencies, shall we say. At the first trial last year, he testified that Karen Read had said “I hit him!” twice. The problem was that two other witnesses, both McAlberts, had also miraculously recalled days later that Karen Read said “I hit him!”

But the McAlberts said Karen had said it three times, not two.

Oh what a tangled web we weave….

But they needed a story. This is their story and they’re sticking to it.

But first they had to… fix Nuttall’s testimony. On Monday night, Nuttall and Brennan went over his new testimony for the third and final time.

“Making sure that everything was as it had been,” Nuttall testified. “I mean and by that I mean it was three times and we were continuously making sure that it was the way it had happened that time.”

Whatever you say, Nuttall. Has anyone ever seen Nuttall and Trooper Paul in the same room?

He says his memory of the incident, which occurred in January 2022, is better now in April 2025 than it was last spring. Because your memory always sharpens as time passes, right?

Jackson kept asking Nuttall what else he’d discussed with Brennan in those three meetings. Jackson brought up another bit of the evolving Nuttall testimony, concerning what the late John O’Keefe was wearing when his body was found.

First he said O’Keefe was wearing a “puffy” coat. Now in Karen Read Season 2, Nuttall says he was wearing a T-shirt. Jackson asked him if he’d discussed his changing puffy-coat testimony with Brennan during those three meetings.

Yes, Nuttall admitted. They had. But, Jackson pointed out, you just told us you hadn’t discussed anything other than “I hit him!” You didn’t tell us about how you talked about the changing stories about the clothes.

“To be perfectly honest,” Nuttall said, not sounding perfectly honest, “I did not remember that until just now.”

“So,” Jackson said, “your memory is already fading… from last night?”

Remember, this was the prosecution’s first witness. This is what the jury is most likely to remember most vividly a couple of months from now when they’re deliberating.

To repeat, first he didn’t say anything about “I hit him!” Then he remembered that she said it not once, but twice. Now he says she said it three times.

And there’s no audio.

And that puffy jacket he swore under oath that O’Keefe was wearing has vanished. And now so has Nuttall’s memory of discussing his altered testimony.

If Timothy Nuttall is the best witness Meatball Morrissey has got, this is going to be a slaughter. Let’s hope so.