Brian Higgins testifies about flirty texts, kiss with Karen Read (2024)

Crime

Prosecutor Adam Lally showed jurors texts between Read and Higgins from over the course of several weeks in January 2022.

By Abby Patkin

updated on May 24, 2024

Editor’s note: The following is a summary of Brian Higgins’s Friday testimony in Karen Read’s murder trial prior to the lunch break. A subsequent article summarizes his afternoon testimony.

Jurors caught a further glimpse into Karen Read and John O’Keefe’s strained relationship Friday as witness Brian Higgins read through his flirty texts with Read and recalled the moment she “planted a kiss” on him just weeks before O’Keefe died.

Higgins had gone over to O’Keefe’s house in January 2022 to watch a New England Patriots game. He testified that Read walked him out afterward, kissing him as he left.

“And how did she kiss you?” Assistant District Attorney Adam Lally asked.

“Not like a friend,” Higgins replied, adding that he was “taken aback” by the kiss.

Lally showed jurors texts between Read and Higgins from over the course of several weeks in January 2022.

“You’re hot,” Read texted Higgins at one point.

“Are you serious or messing with me?” he replied.

“No, I’m serious,” Read wrote.

“Feeling is mutual,” he responded. “Is that bad?”

Higgins testified that throughout his texts with Read, he was constantly trying to figure out her intentions.

“Was the defendant interested in me? Was she at the end of her relationship with John? Was she trying to weaponize me against John and put me in the middle?” he said. “There was numerous things that were going on, and that’s what I was trying to vet out or suss out, or whatever you want to call it. But I was having a hard time accepting what was happening.”

‘Things are far from perfect’

In some of her texts, Read vented about her relationship with O’Keefe and the couple’s dynamic with O’Keefe’s niece and nephew, who lived with their uncle after their parents died.

“It is very very complicated,” Read wrote. “He and I dated when we were kids and then his sister died and everything got f***ed up.”

She wrote at one point that “things are far from perfect” with O’Keefe.

In another text, Higgins asked Read if she and O’Keefe planned to break up or stay together. She said she didn’t know and mentioned an incident where she accused O’Keefe of kissing another woman on a group trip to Aruba over New Year’s Eve in 2021. The woman in question, Marietta “Etta” Sullivan, denied kissing O’Keefe in her testimony Wednesday.

“It’s just a very very complicated dynamic with the four of us,” Read wrote in one text to Higgins. “He isn’t cut out for what he’s doing. And the kids present constant issues.”

“I think he believes he is doing the right thing,” Higgins replied.

“Well of course he is but his heart isn’t in it,” Read wrote back. “It’s only because he was very very close to his sister.”

She added that O’Keefe’s niece and nephew “are very spoiled.”

“And they’re not my family. My parents keep telling me I’d feel differently if they were mine. Or my own sister’s,” Read continued. “Then I told you he got drunk and sloppy on [New Year’s Eve] while we were away and that has really affected me.”

In another message, she mentioned that O’Keefe showed her Ring surveillance video of her walking Higgins out of O’Keefe’s house after the Patriots game.

“He’s like ‘Christ, are you guys hooking up??’” Read wrote.

“OMG, great,” Higgins replied. “I don’t need drama dude.”

Read reassured him it was fine, adding, “I know where the cameras are anyway, duh.”

Higgins testified that Read also stopped by his house at one point, though he said there was a “weird vibe.”

“You know, I’m not proud of these text messages. It is what it is. I’ll take responsibility for them,” he told the court. “But John was a friend, at the same time. … If they were at the end of their relationship, they were at the end of their relationship. But I wasn’t going to have somebody utilize me and weaponize me against somebody that I liked. It was just a weird experience.”

Why did Brian Higgins go to the Canton Police Department early on Jan. 29, 2022?

Higgins also testified about the time he spent with friends at the Waterfall Bar & Grille in Canton on Jan. 28, 2022. Among the group was Brian Albert, whom Higgins described as “a good friend.”

Read and O’Keefe later joined the group at the Waterfall, and Higgins recalled sending Read messages that read “ummmmmm” and “well.”

“To be honest with you, … I guess you could view it as a flirty text,” he added.

As the bar closed for the night, some of the group continued on to Albert’s home at 34 Fairview Road. Higgins said he only stayed at the afterparty for a short time, leaving sometime between 12:30 a.m. and 1 a.m.

“I knew kind of from the onset when I got in there it probably wasn’t going to be a long time, because I’m not a beer drinker, and that’s what they had,” he said. “So I was probably one of the first people to leave.”

Higgins also denied seeing Read or O’Keefe inside or around 34 Fairview Road.

After leaving Albert’s house, he said he stopped by the Canton Police Department, where he had a satellite office for his duties as a federal agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Higgins testified that he dropped by the station to move his work vehicles to the center of the parking lot, where snowplows could maneuver around them.

He said he returned home and awoke around 6:30 a.m. that morning to his work and personal phones “blowing up” with calls from Brian Albert and then-Canton Police Chief Kenneth Berkowitz. He answered the call from Albert and drove back to 34 Fairview Road, where Brian and Nicole Albert and Nicole’s sister and brother-in-law, Jennifer and Matthew McCabe, were gathered inside.

“People were pretty distraught,” Higgins said. “Because John had been found on the lawn” outside 34 Fairview Road.

Asked for his reaction upon learning of O’Keefe’s death, he replied: “It didn’t make sense to me. I couldn’t do the math in my head, because I know John O’Keefe and the defendant … never showed up. It didn’t make sense.”

He denied talking with Albert on the phone between leaving 34 Fairview Road after midnight on Jan. 29, 2022, and picking up Albert’s call around 6:30 a.m. Albert previously testified he “inadvertently” called Higgins after going to bed on the 29th but didn’t speak with Higgins at the time and did not answer a follow-up call from Higgins shortly after.

Brian Higgins denies that Karen Read ‘ghosted’ him

Higgins testified that the last he heard from Read was a text shortly before noon the day O’Keefe died. “John died,” she wrote.

On cross-examination, defense attorney Alan Jackson noted that the repartee between Read and Higgins appeared to peter out after Jan. 23, 2022.

“She sort of ghosted you, didn’t she?” Jackson asked.

“I wouldn’t agree with that,” Higgins said.

“That was frustrating to you that she just stopped communicating, wasn’t it?” Jackson pressed.

“No, not at all,” Higgins replied.

“You had been moving through this mindset of exploring a romantic interest with a beautiful woman you thought was interested in you, and just like that it was done. Right?” Jackson asked.

“No,” Higgins answered, noting that his texts with Read had been sporadic in the weeks before O’Keefe died.