Read is suing the Town of Canton and Massachusetts State Police, alleging civil conspiracy and negligent hiring, training, and supervision.
Karen Read listens as Massachusetts State Police Sgt. Yuriy Bukhenik testifies during her murder trial in Norfolk Superior Court in Dedham, Mass., Friday, May 9, 2025. Mark Stockwell / The Sun Chronicle via AP, Pool
updated on June 4, 2026 | 2:41 PM
4 minutes to read
Karen Read is suing the Town of Canton and Massachusetts State Police, alleging two law enforcement officials who worked on her murder case are “virulent bigots” whose private messages reveal an “institutional rot at the very core of both organizations.”
The 87-page lawsuit, filed in Bristol Superior Court Thursday, includes a number of vulgar, expletive-filled text messages between the case’s lead investigator, ex-Trooper Michael Proctor, and former Canton Police Sgt. Sean Goode. Goode, who worked the early investigation in Read’s case, resigned earlier this week amid an ongoing internal affairs probe into allegations of misconduct.
Read was acquitted of murder and manslaughter charges last year in the January 2022 death of her boyfriend, Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe. While prosecutors alleged Read drunkenly backed her SUV into O’Keefe and left him to die on a snowy lawn in Canton, she and her lawyers have long maintained others were to blame for the killing.
Proctor, who admitted to sending crass texts about Read to family, friends, and coworkers, was ultimately fired last year over his handling of the case. In Thursday’s complaint, however, Read’s attorneys say those messages were just the tip of the iceberg.
Read’s high-profile case “shone an unflinching spotlight on something” state and local police “have spent years trying to conceal: an imbedded culture of bigotry, misogyny, systemic failures, and institutional rot at the very core of both organizations,” the lawsuit alleges.
Canton officials said they learned of the lawsuit after hearing from reporters, and that the town has not yet been served.
“The Town of Canton has the utmost faith and confidence in the new leadership of Canton Police Department under Chief Michael Daniels, and we would refute any broad stroke characterizations about the brave and dedicated men and women who serve in the Department,” the town said in a statement.
Having made “significant strides forward” over the past two years, “the Department is poised to move further ahead as a modern public safety agency, which the citizens of Canton rightfully expect and deserve,” the town added.
State Police Col. Geoffrey D. Noble, meanwhile, explicitly condemned the “disturbing” messages outlined in Read’s lawsuit as “entirely inconsistent with any basic standard of decency and certainly with the expectations of a Massachusetts State Trooper.”
“These racist, sexist and abhorrent comments absolutely do not reflect the values of the Massachusetts State Police and are not tolerated within our ranks. They underscore and fully support my decision to terminate Michael Proctor,” said Noble, who took over the agency nearly three years after O’Keefe’s death.
While he emphasized the importance of moving forward “with a focus on upholding our standards, strengthening accountability, and supporting the honorable women and men of the State Police,” Noble acknowledged that the agency does so “keenly aware of the ways in which this misconduct harmed the public trust on which our mission depends.”
Lawsuit cites thousands of explicit, slur-filled messages
Proctor and Goode “are virulent bigots whose hatred for anyone and everyone different from themselves permeates their every action,” Read’s lawsuit states.
“They are not officers who occasionally voiced an offensive remark,” the complaint continues. “They are men whose written and recorded communications — sent to one another and to a circle of like-minded friends over the course of a decade — establish entrenched and unrepentant hatred for women, Black Americans, Asian Americans, Jews, Hispanics, Arabs, and gay people.”
The pair’s “unfitness for any position of public trust was not subtle,” and their involvement in the investigation into O’Keefe’s death “invariably and irredeemably contaminated it in every respect,” according to the lawsuit.
Pointing to thousands of messages, Read’s team alleges Proctor and Goode casually threw out slurs and derogatory terms, wished harm on women and people of color, and talked about sexually assaulting romantic partners as they slept. Proctor also discussed “planting coke” on people,” the complaint states.
“[S]he’s a jew…so def puts out,” Goode wrote in one text, according to the complaint. In other texts, he purportedly called Boston Mayor Michelle Wu a “little c—t” and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft a “terrible c—ty Jew.”
While discussing Sandra Birchmore — the young Canton woman allegedly killed by a Stoughton police detective who had groomed her — Goode purportedly told his friends, “[t]hat chick was borderline retarded.”
In another message cited in the lawsuit, Proctor allegedly wrote, “It should be ‘punch a [n-word] day’ in canton today out of retribution. Any [racist slur] u see blast it in the facе.”
“America sucks …. Hitler was really on to something then the f—ing US had to step in and ruin it,” Proctor messaged elsewhere, according to the complaint. He also purportedly wrote that there were “[t]oo many Jews [in Sharon],” adding, “We really should keep them in a concentration camp.”
“Put simply,” Read’s lawyers argued, Proctor and Goode “were then and are now completely and unquestionably unfit to hold positions of authority with MSP and CPD, much less to play important roles — or in Ms. Read’s case, the primary role — in homicide investigations.”
Her complaint brings claims of civil conspiracy and negligent hiring, training, and supervision. Separately, Read still faces a wrongful death lawsuit from O’Keefe’s family and a defamation lawsuit from witnesses in her case who allege she and Turtleboy blogger Aidan Kearney “orchestrated a coordinated campaign” to falsely implicate them in O’Keefe’s death.
Read has also filed a civil conspiracy lawsuit against several of those witnesses, as well as Proctor and two other State Police investigators. That case remains pending in federal court.
Read the new lawsuit below (warning, contains graphic language):
Karen Read’s lawsuit against Canton and Massachusetts State Police
Abby Patkin is a general assignment news reporter whose work touches on public transit, crime, health, and everything in between.
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