Good morning from Norfolk Superior Court for Day 9 of the #KarenRead trial.

I am in the courtroom right from the start today.

There was a very large local standout yesterday for Karen Read. How does a juror, who is expected to avoid all things Karen Read, avoid this while out and about in Norfolk County? Impossible.

Follow this thread for my live, up to the minute updates of today's proceedings.

A special thanks to Silva Funeral Home in Taunton for their sponsorship of my independent work. Parties have mostly arrived. Paul O'Keefe is no longer seated in the front left seat, as he sat for the entirety of the last trial and the first two weeks of this one. He is now seated in the last row, on the opposite side of the seating area.

Good Afternoon from Norfolk Superior Court for a hearing in the Commonwealth vs Aidan Kearney.

I will be live tweeting from inside the courtroom and you can follow all my updates on this thread.

Good morning from Norfolk Superior Court. Today is Day 2 of the #KarenRead murder trial. Read supporters are allowed inside the buffer zone until 8 AM each day. I arrived early and spoke with some of them before I went inside. By 7:59 AM, they had moved on.
I am on the alternate list for the week, so I have set up camp in the press room. Later today we will have the list for press for next week and we'll see if we are inside.

Good morning from Norfolk Superior Court for Day 9 of jury selection in the #KarenRead trial. David is the lone attorney here first this morning. Follow this thread for all my live updates. We've got 58 potential jurors today. Let's see if we can seat the rest of this jury today.

Haven't see the Commonwealth yet.

I have been researching Massachusetts budget line items and their increases since Maura Healey took office. Some of these increases are very substantial. The 2026 number is the proposed number, not final but let's take a look: MassHealth CommonHealth Plan
2023: $128 million
2024: $164 million
2025: $198 million
2026: $340 million

166% increase

I need to explain to you how to take what is happening here and make it real life. Digital activism is important, but you must do more to make change, especially in Massachusetts. 🧵A thread🧵 Last night, my Republican Town Committee hosted the first ever Republican Town Hall event for candidates running for local office in Somerset. For over two decades, the Democrats in town have held a candidates night where they picked the panelists, they picked the questions and they gave candidates a 90 second time limit to respond. We knew we could do better.

Good morning. I am here at Norfolk Superior Court for a hearing regarding @DoctorTurtleboy and potential new charges of witness intimidation related to the #KarenRead case. You can follow me on this thread for updates. Court is scheduled for noon. @DoctorTurtleboy , Bradl and @Bederowlaw have arrived. It looks as if there are other cases being heard in the courtroom and we are not allowed inside. For those who are wondering, we are in a different courtroom today. This is the main courtroom where we were to hear the Karen Read trial until it was moved.

Good Afternoon. I'm here at Norfolk Superior Court for the @DoctorTurtleboy hearing on the motion to dismiss. For the first time, I am in the downstairs front courtroom. This one is nice. Courtroom is full of supporters. I have seen Attorney Bradl, @DoctorTurtleboy. From what I can tell, there will be other cases called here as well. Let's see what's up first.

Yesterday morning, Fall River Mayor Paul Coogan confirmed that City Administrator Seth-Thomas Aitken was under an internal investigation. By the end of the day, Aitken had resigned. Today, I have uncovered the reason behind the investigation. A thread. Last week, two members of the Fall River City Council, Linda Pereira and Michelle Dion, contacted Coogan and told him they individually received information about Aitken and a private business he was associated with. Coogan met with Pereira and Dion last Saturday and city hall.

Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey has pledged to phase out migrant hotel shelters by the end of 2025. How's she going to do it? 🧵 A Thread 🧵 First, migrant families are going to be sent a letter just like this one. It informs the shelter occupants of the date when their shelter will close. For this person who received their letter yesterday, their shelter will close on June 30th.

18 year-old Jacob Pothier was a Massachusetts high school junior when he died last January in a car accident. He and 44 year-old Kathleen Martins were in her car when it crashed, killing Pothier. To date, that is all that the Bristol County District Attorneys office has said about the case and that it is still an open investigation, but we know much more.
🧵 A Thread 🧵 Pothier was a student at Greater New Bedford VocTech. He was a junior when he died. Martins had been a security guard at the high school. It is believed that Martins, a married mother from Dartmouth, groomed Pothier and they were in a sexual relationship for years.

Last month, I was fired from the media company I worked for and made the decision to try and be an independent journalist. The only way I can keep doing this is through readers becoming paid subscribers to my work. Here are some messages I received from followers who have subscribed and make my work possible. Please consider joining them. Thank you, besties.

Last month, the state of Massachusetts released hundreds of incident reports taken at the state funded migrant shelters that detail what's really happening inside the "Healey Hotels."

Starting at 9 AM today, I am going to read through each report and classify what each report is about: domestic violence, drugs, sexual assaults, child welfare checks. Every hour on the hour, I will report back to this thread and give you a tally of where we're at and share one report that I have read. I will spend my whole day doing this, until 5 PM this afternoon.

Someone has to do it. A very disturbing find in the documented incident reports from a migrant hotel in Massachusetts: the death of a child who was unresponsive.

On Monday, December 30th, I received a text message from a known individual in my community who told me that Jacob Vaught, a member of the Somerset Board of Selectmen wanted me to call or text him. Here is a copy of the text message: The person who sent me the message is friends with Vaught. It is well known in our community that I am not a fan of the one-term Selectman. Prior to becoming a reporter, I supported his opponent in their 2022 election and have criticized his performance during the past three years on the board. As a reporter, I documented one of his angry outbursts during a public meeting, where he told a 90-year-old Veteran to “shut it.” You can watch the clip here:

x.com/FallRiverRepor…

The details of disturbing child abuse and neglect from inside Massachusetts migrant shelters are hard to read. The reports come after the @massgop submitted a public records request to the state for information. Thousands of pages of documents giving an inside look into the tax-payer funded shelters.
A thread:

I'm going to start a thread here of a story I have been investigating since January: the death of 18 year old Jacob Pothier from New Bedford. Follow along: In January of this year, 18 year old Jacob Pothier, a student at Greater New Bedford Regional Vocational Technical High School, was killed in a car accident in Dartmouth Massachusetts.

It's time to address @GrantSmithEllis . I have had three or four face to face interactions with @GrantSmithEllis since I have been covering the Karen Read and @DoctorTurtleboy cases. I have had dozens of interactions with him here on Twitter. In this short amount of time, I feel things have accelerated with him.