Karen Read Says She 'Collapsed on the Floor' and Didn't 'Want to Be Alive' After Learning of Boyfriend’s Death

Prosecutors in Karen Read’s high-profile trial claimed she killed her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O’Keefe, when she backed into him with her SUV, leaving him to die in the frigid night air.

In an all-new Dateline NBC, Read, whose trial ended on July 1 with a deadlocked jury, reveals that she took O’Keefe’s death so hard she didn’t want to live anymore.

“I actually texted my father and I said, 'I think John is dead,'” Read says in an exclusive clip of Dateline's "The Night of the Nor’easter," which airs Friday, Oct. 18, at 9/8c on NBC.

Read had just arrived at the house where she’d dropped off O’Keefe, 46, the night before, when she found him lying in the snow.

Dashcam footage from one of the first responders’ emergency vehicles shows Read frantically running back and forth.

“And he — he called me, and I said, 'Dad, I — I — I don't want to be alive,'” she says in the two-hour special. “Like I don't want to live. And I didn't know what the hell — what the hell happened. How did — how did the night end up like this?”

On the night of Jan. 29, 2022, Read, then 44, a successful financial analyst and then-adjunct professor at Bentley University, dropped O’Keefe off at a late-night house party in Canton, Mass., after a night of drinking with his police friends.

She said she watched O’Keefe, 46, walk up the driveway to the side door of the house where retired Boston officer Brian Albert and his family lived. She said when O’Keefe failed to let her know whether or not she should come inside, she left.

Hours later, O’Keefe was found unconscious in the Alberts’ front yard. He was rushed to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

He had two black eyes, skull fractures, cuts on his face and on the back of his hands and claw-like wounds on his right arm. 

The medical examiner ruled the cause of death as “blunt impact injuries of the head and hypothermia,” but could not determine whether the manner of death was homicide or accidental.

Read was charged with second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating under the influence of alcohol and leaving the scene of personal injury and death. She pleaded not guilty to the charges.

The two-hour Dateline special covers the latest developments in the dramatic case that riveted the nation.

During the interview, Read talks about the moment she found O’Keefe lying motionless in the snow on the Alberts' front lawn.“I couldn't see his face or his hair, but I knew it was him,” she says in the episode. “I knew it was something that didn't belong on that lawn,” she says.

Help came quickly, she recalls in the exclusive clip. “Maybe within 15 minutes,” she says. “I don't know who arrived first, a ladder truck or a — I'm not sure. But they were there pretty — in pretty short order.”

Read was also taken to the hospital that morning, she recalls. “I am put under a psychiatric watch just two vestibules down from where they're working on John's body,” she says. 

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“Then eventually, just before noon, my father comes into the room that I'm in. And I said, Dad, how's -- how is he? And he said, he's gone.John's gone, Karen. And I just collapsed on the floor.”

The special also features an interview with Read’s attorney, Alan Jackson, who gives viewers "an exclusive, behind-the-scenes look into the defense’s strategy meetings detailing their theory that Read was framed by police," according to a release.

NBC's Dateline's The Night of the Nor'easter airs Friday, October 18 at 9 p.m. ET/8 p.m. CT.