NOTE: Proctor is due back in court Wednesday. Details and livestream here. Testimony in the Karen Read murder trial resumed Monday with Massachusetts State Police Trooper Michael Proctor, the lead investigator in the case, taking the stand. Read is accused of striking John O’Keefe, her Boston...
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By Alysha Palumbo and Marc Fortier • Published 5 hours ago • Updated 1 min ago
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Is a mirror image video 'true and accurate'?
Bukhenik returned to the stand shortly after 9 a.m., where defense attorney Alan Jackson continued to cross examine him.
Jackson started by showing the surveillance video from the Canton Police Department sallyport, showing Read's SUV in the garage bay.
He asked Bukhenik why he didn't mention during his testimony last week on two separate days that the video was inverted. Only when the defense began to cross examine him did he mention that it appeared the video was a mirror image.
Jackson asked if the video was an accurate depiction of what happened, given that is inverted.
Bukhenik maintained that the video is "true and accurate," as Jackson put it, even though it was a mirror image.
"If the jurors were actually standing where the camera is recording... the back of the vehicle would be on the right and the front of the vehicle would be on the left, but all activity is accurately depicted in the video... It's a mirror image," Bukhenik said.
Jackson also got Bukhenik to acknowledge that the time stamps for the sallyport video cover 17 minutes of time, but only just under six minutes of time is included on the recording.
"The video that was produced is what we got," Bukhenik said.
Jackson asked if there were obvious portions of the video where people seemed to appear out of nowhere
"It's not a smooth recording of the events... that is due to the triggering of the recording," Bukhenik said.
But he said he has seen other systems where recordings are triggered only by motion to time parameters to save on storage capacity.
Jackson showed a portion of the video where it showed a person appearing at the rear of Read's SUV, apparently out of nowhere.
Shortly after 9:30 a.m., Jackson introduced a flash drive into evidence and show its contents to the jury.
The flash drive contained another video of the sallyport, showing the correct, unmirrored image of investigators going over Read's SUV. He specifically zeroed in on a period of time that was missing from the video, saying that was the time when Massachusetts State Police Trooper Michael Proctor, the lead investigator in the case, was examining the taillight on Read's vehicle.
During redirect, Assistant District Attorney Adam Lally asked Bukhenik if any of the video from the sallyport had been altered in any way. Bukhenik said it had not been changed.
Lally also had the entire 5 minute, 50 second video from the sallyport replayed, and then had Buhhenik confirm that it was time stamped after all of the other video evidence that jurors have seen to this point.
Bukhenik also testified that the video of the sallyport accurately depicted the actions that took place, other than it being inverted.
He also said neither he nor Proctor ever touched the rear quarter panel of the vehicle, where the taillight is located.
Bukhenik also explained why he initially stated that O'Keefe's injuries might have been as a result of a domestic assault instead of being hit by a vehicle.
"Up to that point we had learned that the defendant stated she had hit him. We had collected a broken glass. So based on the physical evidence and the statements made by the defendant to first responders at the scene at that point in time, I had communicated those facts to the medical examiner's office," he said.
But he also said at that point he had not yet been to the hospital to see O'Keefe's injuries, so he was relying entirely on information from police and firefighters at the scene. After going to the hospital and viewing O'Keefe's injuries, he said it he could tell that the broken glass was most likely not the weapon that was used to cause the injuries to the back of O'Keefe's head.
