A Jefferson Parish judge on Thursday (June 18) sentenced Terry Reed to 80 years in prison for his conviction of sexually abusing teenaged boys in his Terrytown home under the guise of acting as their pastor. 

Reed, 66, was convicted by a Jefferson Parish jury on May 6 of two counts of third-degree rape and two counts of molestation of a juvenile. He sexually abused both victims after gaining the trust from their guardians and taking them into his East Monterey Drive home, where he used scripture to manipulate the youths in normalizing his sexual behavior with them. 

He brought the teens into his home despite his being a sex offender for similar behaviors involving other teenaged boys. In 1997, he pleaded guilty to indecent behavior with a juvenile. In 2017, he pleaded guilty to indecent behavior with a juvenile and molestation of a juvenile. 

Click here to read about the trial. 

During Thursday’s sentencing hearing, the mother of one of the victims testified that Reed, whom she had known since she was a young girl, used “manipulation tactics” to gain her trust and allow him to take in her son. As a single mother who lived out of state, she said, she was reaching out to find help for her troubled son.  

“At that point I gave Terry the opportunity to be the grandfather figure that he long wanted to be,” she said in victim-impact testimony. Instead, he isolated her son from others and sexually abused her son. 

Reed knew that she, too, was sexually abused as a child. “His actions triggered the deepest wound of my childhood. I felt profoundly betrayed.” 

“I’m deeply disappointed because I trusted Terry to do the right thing,” she testified. 

She read a victim-impact letter on behalf of her son, who was not present for Thursday’s hearing. “It is done. It is over. And I couldn’t be more glad,” he wrote. 

“You disgust me,” he wrote. “And when I saw you in court, I saw an utter failure and a sorry excuse for a man.” 

After rejecting four defense motions to overturn the verdict and get a new trial, Judge Ray Steib of the 24th Judicial District Court sentenced Reed to 25 years for each of the third-degree rape charges, to be served at hard labor without benefit of probation, parole or suspension of sentence; and to 15 years in prison for each of the molestation charges. 

Judge Steib ran the sentences consecutively, for a total of 80 years. 

Assistant District Attorneys James Wascom and Eric Cusimano prosecuted the case. Assistant District Attorney Theresa King handled the sentencing hearing.