Justice for Selonia Reed remains elusive

Saturday, May 9, 2020, Reginald Reed, Jr., working through a bail bond agent, paid a 250,000-dollar cash bond to see his father released from jail the following morning. The agent and Reed discussed the case for weeks before Reed decided to go through with the bond.

The Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff’s Office arrested the elder Reed one year earlier, on June 21, 2019, charging him with second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder in the brutal slaying of Selonia Smith Reed, Reginald, Jr.’s mother.

The following Sunday, Mother’s Day, the bondsman got Reginald Reed out of the Tangipahoa Parish Prison and drove him to the Winn Dixie in Amite. Due to restrictions imposed during the pandemic, the sheriff’s office allowed only bondsmen in and out of the prison. The agent told me later that she was unaware of the evidence against the man or the rape charges filed against him in an unrelated case.

“I took his photo,” the agent said. “That was the first 250,000-dollar bond I had written. I guess I was too excited to be scared.”

The bondsman is too young to remember Selonia Reed’s murder thirty-five years ago.

At 6:30 on another Sunday morning, August 23, 1987, Reginald Reed phoned Gwen Smith at North Oaks Hospital to tell her that his wife, Selonia, had gone out with friends the night before and had not returned home.

Gwen Smith told him, “That’s not like my sister. She wouldn’t go out and leave Little Reggie at home.”

Gwen Smith told me later, “Even if Loni had done such a thing, she would have been home before Little Reggie got up. He was a momma’s boy. She didn’t go anywhere without him.”

An hour after speaking to his wife’s sister, Reginald Reed phoned the Hammond Police Department and reported Selonia missing. Another hour passed before a patrol unit found her car in a convenience store parking lot near a carwash less than a mile from the police station; her mutilated body slumped in the passenger’s seat.

Jackie Smith, another sister, lived in the Reed home the week before Selonia’s death. “Reginald had gone out of town on business. Loni was off work from Citizen’s Bank—home on vacation—and she was afraid to be alone. So she picked me up, we stopped at our father’s place, and she asked Dad if he would buy her a gun.”

“I thought she was afraid of the neighbor, a maintenance man that did work for them sometimes. One night, I stepped out on the porch to smoke. Loni said, ‘No. Go into the bathroom.’ She hated smoke in her house, so I knew something wasn’t right. This was about 10:30 at night. Loni heard Little Reggie moving around in his room and went to check on him, and I went outside anyway. As I stepped off the porch, a man came out of the shadows. He almost scared me to death. Loni came to the door, saw us talking, and told me to get inside. We were both shook up.”

After Reginald Reed returned, the family of three drove Jackie Smith back home to New Orleans. “That Friday night, we had dinner. Everything seemed fine. I had no idea that was the last time I’d see my sister.”

Gwen Smith said she saw their sister the night before her murder.

“My car was in the shop, and Loni gave me a ride home from work. She didn’t say anything about going out with any girlfriends. Instead, she said she was going to the mall to pick up some things and asked if I wanted to go. I told her I was tired and had to work early the next morning.”

That morning was the Sunday Reginald Reed called her.

“I went straight to Loni’s house from work. The police were there, but there was something strange. Don’t get me wrong, Loni was a good housekeeper, but this place looked and smelled unusually clean, immaculate. There was no trash in the cans. Even the dirty clothes hamper was empty.”

“She was going back to work that Monday, so it made sense that she would clean up. I just never saw her house like that before. I still think about that sometimes.”

Tangipahoa Parish Coroner Dr. Vincent Cefalu said the autopsy showed Selonia Reed died of four puncture wounds to her heart. Cefalu said the killer inflicted her wounds with “an instrument larger than an ice pick, but smaller than a knife, about the caliber of a screwdriver.”

Cefalu visibly choked up in a press conference, describing how police found the 26-year-old with an umbrella forced into her vagina and her face savagely beaten. “It was just a bad sight,” he said.

After Selonia’s murder, Jimmy Ray Barnes, the handyman Jackie described, fled the state. Investigators found him in Alabama in 2019. Today, he resides in the Tangipahoa Parish Prison, charged with the same offenses as Reginald Reed.

At Reed’s pre-trial hearing, one witness testified to seeing both defendants at the carwash next to where police found Selonia’s body.

“I was sitting in my truck with my three-year-old son in his car seat,” she told the court. “I was writing a check for my gas when I saw this car moving slowly through the parking lot.”

She said the occupants did not appear to be going into the store, and the car they drove appeared “Spic and Span” clean. The witness wrote down the license plate number, she said, in case the store was later robbed.

When she walked across the parking lot to the store carrying the check, she saw the two men sitting in the front seat of the car inside the carwash. She saw their faces clearly.

After paying for her gas and exiting the store, she saw the men again standing outside the vehicle.

The following day, police found Selonia’s body inside her car near that same carwash. When the witness heard the news that afternoon, Detective Vincent Giannoble told the court, she called the Hammond Police Department and provided the license plate number to Lieutenant Steve Raacke.

Running the plates, Giannoble found the car registered to Reginald Reed’s mother. He then prepared a Polaroid photo lineup of the men Giannoble believed had access to the vehicle. The group included Reginald Reed, three brothers, and two family friends.

According to Giannoble, on September 10, 1987, he presented the six color photos to the witness, and “she took only seconds” to identify Reginald Reed and Jimmy Ray Barnes. Today, both men are co-defendants in the Selonia Reed murder case.

“Reggie, Jr. told me,” The bail agent remembered, “the only evidence they had on his dad is the word of a bum living under a bridge in Alabama.”

With every passing day, chances increase that more witnesses and evidence may be lost. However, three years after his arrest, Reginald Reed walks free, innocent until proven guilty, as judges grant continuance after continuance to postpone his murder trial. The next target date is in August 2022.