Karen Read jury selection enters home stretch with 15 of 16 chosen

Jury selection for Karen Read's retrial on murder and other charges in the death of her Boston police officer boyfriend, John O'Keefe, resumes Thursday with just one more seat to fill.

The court requires 12 deliberating jurors and four alternates.

At the end of the day on Wednesday, there were 15 people chosen, clearing the way for an expected start to opening statements next week.

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Read faces charges of second-degree murder, leaving the scene of a fatal accident and manslaughter in connection with O'Keefe's death on Jan. 29, 2022.

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Prosecutors say she backed into him with her Lexus SUV and left him on the ground in a blizzard.

He died of blunt force trauma to his head and signs of hypothermia, according to an autopsy.

Read could face life in prison if convicted of the top charge. She has a separate Supreme Court petition pending in which she is asking the nation's highest court to dismiss two of the three charges, leaving her to face just the manslaughter charge.

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Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on Wednesday denied Read's petition to pause her murder trial until after the Supreme Court considers her petition.

Read has pleaded not guilty and expressed her innocence both in and out of court, sitting for multiple media interviews and insisting that she did not kill O'Keefe. 

Her defense has raised the possibility that someone else beat him to death and left him in the cold. They have also questioned the nature of injuries found on his right arm.

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In addition to injuries on his face, head and hands, he had a series of cuts and puncture wounds on his arm.

O'Keefe was found on the front lawn of another Boston police officer who has since retired, Brian Albert. Flaws in the initial investigation led to an outside audit of the local police department in Canton, Massachusetts, where Albert lived at the time.

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Auditors found a series of shortcomings and flaws but no signs of a coordinated effort to frame Read for the crime by the Canton Police Department.

The lead investigator, former Massachusetts State Trooper Michael Proctor, lost his job last month after an internal review looked into his behavior after the revelation at Read's first trial that he sent lewd text messages with details about the active investigation to people who were not privy to sensitive law enforcement proceedings.

The trial is expected to take six to eight weeks once the full jury is seated.

Jury selection began on April 1.

Fox News' Maria Paronich and Kevin Ward contributed to this report.