What Do the Cops in the Sandra Birchmore and Karen Read Cases Have in Common?

Every case Michael Proctor ever investigated now carries a question mark — and that question mark just got a lot bigger. According to a lawsuit filed against the Town of Canton and Massachusetts State Police, the fired state police trooper who led the investigation into John O’Keefe’s death had been exchanging messages with Canton Sgt. Sean Goode for more than a decade. Messages that, according to the complaint, allegedly include racial slurs, antisemitic statements, discussions of planting evidence on people, and a derogatory comment about Sandra Birchmore — the woman whose death in her Canton apartment was initially ruled a suicide and is now at the center of a federal case against former Stoughton detective Matthew Farwell.

Proctor was already pulled from the Brian Walshe prosecution because the state couldn’t trust his testimony. Defense attorneys across multiple other cases he investigated have pushed for access to his communications. And now the documented record shows that the contempt wasn’t limited to one investigation or one person — it allegedly spanned years, departments, and the kind of language that reveals exactly how these officers saw the communities they policed.

On the Birchmore side, four officers from the Stoughton Police Department have been decertified or permanently barred from law enforcement. According to federal prosecutors, three of them allegedly became involved with the same young woman they met through a department youth program. The medical examiner changed Birchmore’s manner of death to “undetermined” more than five years after she died.

The through-line connecting both cases isn’t geography, although both happened in Canton. It’s a culture where officers allegedly believed they were untouchable — and where every institution that should have caught the behavior either looked the other way or genuinely didn’t register it as wrong. The families of Sandra Birchmore and John O’Keefe are the ones paying for that failure.

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