Dad whose terminally ill mother killed his ex in UES murder-suicide must return to NYC for custody hearing with victim’s parents: judge
The man whose mom fatally shot his estranged partner before killing herself in an Upper East Side horror must return to the city for a court battle involving the victim’s parents, a judge has ruled.
Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Michael Katz ordered the in-person hearing for early September, according to a signed order Monday.
The move paves the way for a face-to-face showdown between the man, Zachariah Reed, and his dead ex’s parents, Nancy and John Galloway.
Reed’s terminally ill mom, ex-Chicago probation officer Kathleen Leigh, 65, shot dead his ex, special education teacher Marisa Galloway, 45, on a Manhattan street last month in an alleged sick effort to grant her son full custody of his and Galloway’s 4-year-old daughter, Lili. Leigh then killed herself.
Galloway’s grieving parents have claimed in a lawsuit that Reed has since absconded with Lili to his “multimillion-dollar home” in Chicago, preventing them from continuing their treasured close relationship with their motherless granddaughter. The grandparents currently have custody of Marisa’s younger daughter, Mariel, 1, who is the product of a sperm donor.
The grandparents’ emergency filing asked the judge to cement part of the custody agreement that had previously between hashed out by Reed and Galloway over Lili and allegedly gave them the rights to it should anything happen to their daughter.
The grandparents also demanded that the young girl be returned to the New York metro area immediately to ensure it.
The judge denied both requests, at least for now.
Instead, the signed order declares that Reed and Galloway’s parents will have to hash out a new visitation schedule involving them.
Nancy and John Galloway included claims in their affidavits that Reed’s mother shot their daughter to pave the way for him to get full custody of Lili.
“Clearly, [Reed’s] mother had a deliberate plan to kill Marisa in order to provide custody for her son,” the court papers charge. “Unfortunately, [Reed] has demonstrated an absolute intention to further those same goals of his mother as he has refused to provide us with any access to Lili at all in almost 3 weeks.”
The grandparents said that since the shooting, they haven’t even been able to chat with Lili by phone.
When their daughter was alive, they spent lots of quality time with the child, including gardening and baking together, the heartbroken couple said.
“When we did not see [Lili], we would Facetime almost every day,” Nancy wrote in an affidavit filed last week.
