14 DAY TRIAL // An obituary published in Reno blames a late mother of eight for abusing her children and causing them deep rooted psychological distress.
Marianne Theresa Johnson-Reddick was 78 years old when she died “alone” in a nursing home in Reno.
She had eight children, but she outlived two of them. She is described as a violent and “evil” woman, beating, torturing, and stalking her children and their loved ones.
After the obit was pulled over a wrong date for the woman's demise, her daughter, Katherine Reddick, is stepping out of the shadow to defend her gesture.
“On behalf of her children whom she so abrasively exposed to her evil and violent life, we celebrate her passing from this earth and hope she lives in the afterlife reliving each gesture of violence, cruelty, and shame that she delivered on her children,” she wrote in the scathing obituary, published in the Reno Gazette Journal.
In an interview on child abuse with the Journal Sentinel, she describes being separated from her brothers and placed in an orphanage.
All her siblings went on to live with foster families, but the mother's abuse would continue during visits.
“On weekends, they were sent home to an office on Court Street in Reno, sometimes lined up and beaten with a steel-tipped belt,” the article describes.
Marianne Theresa entered a convent, where she was able to stay for eight years.
“I was raised by the nuns and priests. [...] I entered the convent, and I was a sister of Good Shepherd for 8 years. After I left, I got married,” she says.
She recalled not being adopted and going through foster care, while courts did nothing to take away her mother's parental rights.
“We were constantly physically, mentally abused even after being taken away and put in the children’s home.
“How do you let a child live in foster care for 14, 15 or more years?” her brother, Patrick Reddick, testified as part of a 1987 legislative meeting on child abuse bills.