John O’Keefe did not hit the back of his head and suffer fatal injuries on the lawn where Karen Read found him the morning after prosecutors allege she clipped him with her Lexus SUV and left him to die in a blizzard, according to a defense expert.

“If you fall back on a flat surface, you get, many times the tear you get in the scalp can be more like a star because you just hit one part, and then the tears go and kind of a star pattern,” testified Dr. Elizabeth Laposata, pointing to an evidence photo not shown on the courthouse video stream.

“And also, because you would not have those vertical, discrete vertical scraping of the skin, you, you would tend to if you fell back on grass, you would tend to see, you might see grass in the wound, or you would tend to see an irregular kind of crisscross pattern of the flattened grass. And that’s not what we have here on Mr. O’Keefe.”

She said he must’ve hit his head on an uneven surface.

Karen Read arrives at Norfolk County Superior Court, Tuesday, May 20, 2025, in Dedham, Mass. Read is charged with killing her Boston police officer boyfriend by intentionally driving her SUV into him. (Hans Pennink for Fox News Digital)

Laposata is a forensic pathologist and professor at Brown University’s medical school, whom Jackson described as “absolutely peerless,” although she resigned from her prior role as Rhode Island’s chief medical examiner amid an audit that found her office let hundreds of incomplete autopsies languish under her watch, according to local reports from the time.

She returned to the stand once jurors arrived, and she explained the internal injuries to O’Keefe’s brain and said pressure on the brain stem from internal swelling and bleeding as a result of the fracture is what killed him.

The cut over his right eye, however, was caused by a different impact. She said it did not appear to have been inflicted by the spoiler on the back of Read’s SUV.