Most newspaper obituaries adhere to one of a handful of set formulas that incorporate listing the name of the deceased, date of passing, predeceasing and surviving relatives, and where and when services will be held. Some deviate from this standard by providing additional information about the departed, information that is almost always of a laudatory nature. However, every now and again one encounters a written send-off that is far from the expected loving expression of facts about the person who died.

Such was the case with the obituary of Dolores Aguilar. The obit for this 79-year-old woman ran on 16 and 17 August 2008 in the Vallejo [California] Times-Herald. It was placed by one of the deceased’s many daughters.

According to John Bogert of the Daily Breeze (a newspaper based in the South Bay area of Los Angeles ), Dolores Aguilar’s daughter was moved to place the notice after reviewing the obituary of a co-worker’s father and noting as she read through it how little any of it fit her mother. “What struck me was how my mother was none of the things I was reading. She was never there for us, she was never good and she left no legacy. So how could I say any of the usual things about her?” said the daughter to Bogert. She and her siblings, she maintained, were kept “unfed, poorly clothed and completely terrorized.”

Before agreeing to run the unusual obituary, the Times-Herald took the additional step of requesting a copy of the death certificate, just to ensure that what they were being asked to publish wasn’t a hoax. It wasn’t: the woman being memorialized had passed away on 7 August 2008.

On 10 September 2013, the Reno Gazette-Journal published a similar obituary (in both its print and online versions) for Marianne Theresa Johnson-Reddick, who had passed away at the age of 78 and was described in her obit as having “neglected and abused her small children” and lived an “evil and violent life”:

Marianne Theresa Johnson-Reddick born Jan 4, 1935 and died alone on Aug. 30, 2013. She is survived by her 6 of 8 children whom she spent her lifetime torturing in every way possible. While she neglected and abused her small children, she refused to allow anyone else to care or show compassion towards them. When they became adults she stalked and tortured anyone they dared to love. Everyone she met, adult or child was tortured by her cruelty and exposure to violence, criminal activity, vulgarity, and hatred of the gentle or kind human spirit. 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 after-life reliving each gesture of violence, cruelty, and shame that she delivered on her children. Her surviving children will now live the rest of their lives with the peace of knowing their nightmare finally has some form of closure. Most of us have found peace in helping those who have been exposed to child abuse and hope this message of her final passing can revive our message that abusing children is unforgivable, shameless, and should not be tolerated in a “humane society”. Our greatest wish now, is to stimulate a national movement that mandates a purposeful and dedicated war against child abuse in the United States of America.

Johnson-Reddick’s unusual obituary quickly garnered national attention, and the Gazette-Journal published a follow-up article explaining its origins: