The woman who killed the mother of her granddaughter before committing suicide did so as part of a sick elaborate plot to get her Upper East Side son full custody of the 4-year-old, new court papers allege.
The dlsturbing Manhattan filing also reveals heartbreaking details about what life has been like for victim Marisa Galloway’s parents after the slay-suicide horror that robbed them of their daughter.
Terminally ill ex-Chicago probation officer Kathleen Leigh, 65, fatally shot Galloway — a 45-year-old special-education teacher who shared a child with Leigh’s son, Zachariah Reed — last month on a leafy Manhattan street before killing herself.
Now Galloway’s parents, Nancy and John Galloway, have filed an emergency court petition claiming Reed has run off to his Chicago “multi-million dollar home” with their beloved grandchild Lili under the pretext of “mourning” Leigh’s death and barred the Galloways from any contact — including even a video call — with the child.
“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 — who live in Cape May, NJ — are asking a Manhattan Supreme Court judge to pass on Marisa’s parenting time, hashed out in a 2022 custody agreement with Reed, to them, according to legal papers filed Friday.
They are also asking that Reed be forced to live in the Big Apple until Lili is 18 so that she can keep a close relationship with her grandparents and with her half-sister, Mariel, the 1-year-old daughter Marisa had with a sperm donor, the filing shows.
The Galloways currently have custody of Mariel, police sources have told The Post.
Nancy, in a heartbreaking affidavit, laid out the adoring and “hands on” relationship she and her husband had with Lili when they saw her two to three times a month, often for multiple nights at a time, when Marisa would often bring the kids to their Garden State home or when they visited Marisa and the girls in the city.
‘When we did not see [Lili], we would Facetime almost every day,” Nancy wrote in an affidavit.
Nancy and John were actively involved in raising the girl, even changing her diapers and feeding her as a baby, and as she’s grown, the grandparents each have special activities they love to do with her, the filing says.
John and Lili love gardening together, and they water the flowers and pick cherry tomatoes from his garden — which he is waiting to tend to until the girl is with him, Nancy’s affidavit says.
And Nancy loves to teach French to Lili and bake cakes with the child, whose “favorite part was cracking the eggs,” Nancy says in the papers.
When Nancy and Lili finished a 150-piece puzzle of the United States in just over an hour, the little girl was “so proud,” the filing says.
“While Marisa was always the best mother, we would love to be involved with all aspects of taking care of an infant, toddler, and ultimately the little girl that Lili currently is,” Nancy wrote.
Nancy said she is “extremely uncomfortable” being forced to file the petition but worried Lili would become estranged from her mom’s side of the family if they didn’t intervene.
The grandmother laid out the history of Marisa and Reed’s “tumultuous relationship” since the pair split and their “contentious” custody battle.
She claimed the pair dated before Marisa became pregnant but said their relationship ended — “driven by the interference of [Reed’s] mother.”
Marisa and Reed had lived together until she “was forced to move out … by [Reed] on July 25, 2021 because Marisa feared for her safety,” the affidavit explains.
The pair eventually hashed out a custody agreement over Lili on Nov. 4, 2022, where the mom had her for nine out of every 14 nights, and the other nights were Reed’s time with the girl, the court papers say.
The estranged couple also agreed they would both live within the five boroughs of New York City until Lili was out of high school unless they otherwise both agreed or were ordered by a court, the filing claims.
Their custody agreement had a provision that specified that the custody terms were “binding” on Marisa and Reed’s estates and executors if something were to happen to them, the suit says.
Nancy explained in the filing that Marisa “was always very concerned with Lili having a sibling” so she decided “to take on the herculean task of having a second child with an anonymous sperm donor in order to provide Lili with either a brother or a sister.”
Lili has been so “proud” to be Mariel’s older sister, and “from the second that Mariel was born, her and Lili had a very special relationship,” Nancy says in the document.
Lili sings Mariel songs, plays with her baby sister with their “stuffies” and draws her pictures, including of their family, Nancy says in the affidavit.
When Mariel would wake up from a nap, Lili would feed her Cheerios or bananas and would do funny dances and sing for her, the filing says.
“On July 26, 2024, all of our lives were changed forever,” a heartbroken Nancy wrote.
That day, Marisa — a former volunteer track coach at Fordham University and a board member of the Central Park Track Club — had packed her bags and put Mariel into her Honda Civic to go spend five nights with her parents in New Jersey. She was going to pick up Lili from her father before heading out of town, the court papers say.
But Leigh approached Marisa as she was loading something into the trunk and shot her once in the back of the head and again in the back before turning the gun on herself.
Leigh had been terminally ill with cancer and had been living with Reed at his East 79th Street apartment, where Lili would also stay during Reed’s visitation time.
Before her heinous crime, Leigh scrawled a seven-page letter “For Police” describing how she felt Marisa was trying to alienate Lili from Reed and saying she suspected Marisa of abusing Lili — despite child services clearing Marisa in two probes launched by Reed and the accounts of friends and family that Marisa was nothing but a doting mother.
“She took away the child’s mother in order to make her son happy … it’s shocking,” a law-enforcement source had told The Post of Leigh right after the murder-suicide. “I’ve seen a lot of s–t but this is Biblical s–t.”
Nancy says in court papers that she and her husband have asked Reed “numerous” times since the horror to speak with Lili, as they are concerned with how she is doing after losing her mother and over concerns that the young sisters need to comfort each other — but Reed hasn’t even let them see her on video calls.
“We have no idea how [Lili] is doing, or what [Reed] has even told Lili about her mother,” the court papers say. “This is beyond unacceptable and must be rectified immediately.”
The grandparents say they are so committed that they will remain at Marisa’s apartment on East 86th Street during weekday visitations with Lily. They are also demanding Lili has daily video calls with Mariel.
The Galloways’ lawyer and the lawyer who represented Reed in his initial custody case with Marisa both did not immediately return Post requests for comment. A working number for Reed could not immediately be found.
