
Howie Carr: Something’s afoot in Karen Read case
Back in 1971, in a courtroom scene from his movie “Bananas,” Woody Allen perfectly summed up this ongoing second Karen Read murder trial, 54 years later in Dedham.
“This trial is a travesty,” Allen’s character yelled at the judge. “It is a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of two mockeries of a sham. I move for a mistrial!”
C’mon on down, Mass State Police Sgt. Yuriy Bukhenik, chief of the elite Rubber Ducky Detail out in Norfolk County, and also a member of the so-called homicide unit.
Bukhenik is a naturalized US citizen from Ukraine, where he lived until he was nine. His grasp of his second language, English, tends to fail him under pressure. He also can’t do simple math. Last year he forfeited five days of vacation for his unspeakable behavior in this very same murder investigation.
In short, Bukhenik is a knucklehead’s knucklehead. But he has figured out what he has to do to keep his phony-baloney job that pays $211,080, which is a lot more than he ever made in his other jobs with the VA police and then the Attleboro Police.
His boss is the bloated district attorney Meatball Morrissey, and Bukhenik has 800 connections to Meatball – all of which have George Washington’s portrait on them.
You scratch Meatball’s back, he scratches yours.
And so this below-average dunce is on the homicide unit, as well as the MSP rubber ducky detail, which probes the ongoing crime wave of tiny toy rubber ducks appearing in Canton, where the murder of John O’Keefe took place.
That murder, involving multiple police officers, including the victim, is unsolved. So is the murder the previous year in Canton of Sandra Birchmore, allegedly by a cop in Stoughton who went to Stoughton High School, the same school as Bukhenik.
In 2021, Bukhenik’s homicide unit deduced that the pregnant Birchmore committed suicide. The feds thought otherwise. They arrested Bukhenik’s fellow cop and Stoughton High graduate and now have him in custody.
But Bukhenik is a crack sleuth. He didn’t rest on the laurels of his suicide finding in the murder of the pregnant woman by his fellow cop from Stoughton High. He wasn’t baffled. He knew what had happened to John O’Keefe, the Boston cop.
“At dat point,” he stammered, “our theory has had evolved to a vehicle strike and I was suspectin’ dat he was hit out of his shoes.”
His shoes? Oddly, O’Keefe’s sneakers became another bone of contention Thursday, when at one point Bukhenik introduced the wrong shoes into evidence. To suspicious minds, it might appear that something was… afoot. Were the cops… sneaking around?
To paraphrase O.J. Simpson’s lawyer, “If the shoe ain’t right, the case ain’t airtight.”
Bukhenik and his fellow “detectives” from the DA’s office had to step into the murder probe because of the fact that a bunch of local cops were involved in one way or another in the murder of the Boston cop O’Keefe.
I’ll let Bukhenik give you the ESL explanation of why the Canton PD checked out.
“We had learned that there was a loose familiarial (sic) connection through town channels the address and the possibility of a Canton police officer or detective out of overwhelming precaution of impropriety not that there was one decided to step away from any interview investigation assistance with us.”
By the way, he did say “familiarial.”
The Canton PD wasn’t worried about being removed from the frame-up, er investigation. Because if the MSP’s homicide unit could allegedly cover up the Sandra Birchmore murder during a snowstorm, it could just as easily broom the O’Keefe murder in a blizzard exactly one year later.
Bukhenik knew what he had to do.
“I would have to pick up the slack,” he said in his garbled English. “I’m a team player. I always want to assist in any which way I can to make others’ life easier.”
It’s important to get to the scene of the crime as soon as possible.
“Timing is essential,” he explained to the jury. “We have to make sure we get to any and every location that could possibly have evidence and prevent that evidence from being destroyed, altered or concealed.”
For the record, John O’Keefe was murdered on Jan. 29. Buhkenik made his first visit to the crime scene, 34 Fairview, on Feb. 3.
Many questions were left unasked on direct examination. Bukhenik mentioned that he lives “in the real world.” I beg to differ. He lives in Stoughton, investigates unsolved cop-involved murders next door in Canton and works for a corrupt Kamala Harris delegate named Meatball Morrissey.
“Sgt. Bukhenik,” he could have been asked, “in the real world, don’t you think most cops really try to find out the identities of the real murderers, even if they’re your pals? Don’t you think most cops maintain a chain of custody, even with the shoes of the murder victims….”
Bukhenik seems much more comfortable on the rubber ducky detail. Last July, he tracked down a young mother of two, who was suspected of dropping a rubber ducky toy on a bench in front of a restaurant owned by one of the McAlberts, a jailbird selectman named Chris Albert.
On the bottom of the rubber ducky was scrawled: “Free Karen Read.”
This will not stand – not in Norfolk County! Not when Yuriy Bukhenik is on the beat.
He took off in his cruiser and tracked her down, and began yelling at the woman in front of her children.”
“I just wanna get it from you where the ducks come from… Where did you get these little ducks… You see how that looks?”
The young mother couldn’t believe some guy was giving the third degree in pidgin English. What did rubber duckies have to do with these unsolved murders in Canton that this hulking moron was supposed to be investigating?
He answered her question:
“We investigate homicides and this being relative to the homicide investigation… Did you purchase these ducks, uh, uh, for a certain reason? Why – what’s the reason you purchased these tiny little ducks?”
That’s Yuriy Bukhenik. He’s dumber than a box of rocks, but one thing he’s figured out. It’s better being in Norfolk County and getting paid big money for doing nothing than it is going back to his own country and fighting the Russians.
Like Woody Allen, I move for a mistrial!
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State Police Sgt. Yuriy Bukhenik (Pool Photo/Charles Krupa)