Commonwealth v. Read — Trial ArchiveIrini Scordi-Bello
Dr. Irini Scordi-Bello is a board-certified forensic and anatomic pathologist employed by Norfolk County who conducted the autopsy of John O'Keefe on January 31, 2022. She testified in both trials as a prosecution witness, presenting her autopsy findings including skull fractures, arm abrasions, hand contusions, and signs of hypothermia. Her official determination — cause of death as blunt impact injuries of head and hypothermia, manner of death undetermined — placed her at the center of the trial's central dispute, as her findings neither confirmed nor excluded the prosecution's vehicle-strike theory.
Trial 1 vs Trial 2
In Trial 1, cross-examination by Elizabeth Little focused primarily on the injury patterns — the absence of lower-body injuries and whether the arm and facial wounds were more consistent with a physical altercation than a vehicle strike. In Trial 2, Robert Alessi pursued a substantially deeper methodological challenge, attacking Scordi-Bello's reliance on information from Trooper Proctor, her failure to perform differential diagnosis, the absence of Wischnewski ulcer terminology in her report, and the lack of frostbite findings despite extreme cold — framing the medical examiner's analysis as incomplete rather than simply reaching the wrong conclusion. The redirect in Trial 2 also introduced rehabilitation on the grand jury testimony that had no equivalent in Trial 1.