Selonia Reed’s son accepts his father’s guilt

After decades of denying the facts, Reginald Reed Jr. has accepted the evidence that his father brutally slaughtered his mother in 1987. “Reggie Junior,” who was a child when his mother died, also says he has forgiven his father.

This week, Newsweek published an article written by Reggie Junior. In the report, the now 46-year-old wrote, “Being raised by a single father who is currently serving a life sentence in prison and maintaining a strong connection with him despite his involvement in my mother’s murder has been a complex journey.”

Reggie Junior said “the revelation” of his father’s “involvement” in the heinous act devastated him. “It shattered the image I had of him,” he wrote, “It forced me to confront the harsh reality that people we love are capable of terrible things.”

Today, Reggie Junior wrote he has a “strong connection” with his father despite his incarceration and “involvement” in his mother’s murder.

The nightmare began on a rainy Sunday morning, August 23, 1987, when a Hammond police officer found Selonia Reed’s blue 1986 Chevrolet Sprint parked near John’s Curb Market, a convenience store on East Thomas Street, three blocks from the police station and within walking distance of Selonia’s home at 1314 Apple Street.

Inside the car, police found Selonia’s partially clothed body slumped in the passenger seat, the handle of an umbrella visible between her legs.

Before or after sexually assaulting her with the device, court records suggest, her husband beat her face profusely. Her assailant also stabbed her in the chest and neck with an instrument the caliber of a Phillips screwdriver.

Before exiting the car, evidence suggests Reginald Reed drew or wrote something in his wife’s blood with a white substance. Coroner Dr. Vincent Cefalu said whatever it was, it did not melt in the August heat.

Selonia died, the coroner said, from three stab wounds in the right middle lobe of her lungs and one in the right atrium of her heart.

Reginald Reed collected money from four covertly purchased life insurance policies on his wife. Including an accidental death benefit rider, the payout of all policies totaled $707,682.

Forty years later, his blood money spent, Reginald Reed, still a free man, applied to draw his late wife’s social security.

The Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff’s Office finally indicted Reginald Reed in Hammond on June 21, 2019, charging him with second-degree murder.

Judge Dykes sentenced him to mandatory life without parole four years later. Assistant District Attorney Taylor Anthony and Assistant District Attorney Angel Monistere prosecuted the case.

An accomplice to the murder, Jimmy Ray Barnes, 61, testified in Reginald Reed’s trial that he gave Reed a ride after Reed killed his wife and drove the body to the empty parking lot.

Barnes received a five-year sentence, and the 21st Judicial Court released him in January 2023 for time served. Within a year, Barnes, who had moved to Alabama, returned to Hammond to attend the funeral of his identical twin brother. The family held Jimmy Ray Barnes’ funeral one week later after he died in a single-vehicle automobile accident on Wardline Road.

With a critical witness no longer alive to testify against him, Reginald Reed has filed an appeal.

Reggie Junior told Rolling Out magazine this week that his father “Still claims his innocence regarding having any involvement.”

Reed Junior’s Newsweek article concluded with a pitch for readers to buy his book, “The Day My Mother Never Came Home,” where the man who was six years old when his mother died “recalls the events surrounding the unsolved murder of his mother and the subsequent indictment and trial of his father, nearly 40 years later.”