Virus deaths hit home in Southern Nevada

Ex-felon worked to make a difference in her community

Lois Reed’s North Las Vegas home was the site of a voter registration drive, the kitchen for her exclusive, subscription-only tamales business and where she saw her family every day. It is where her spirit will live forever, after COVID-19 took her suddenly in November.

“If you didn’t have the opportunity to meet her, you truly missed out,” said her daughter Kharli Payne. “It’s almost like never seeing Beyonce or never hearing Prince’s music.”

That’s because Reed never sat still, never cut corners and always spoke her truth. She dispensed tough love but never in a way that made you feel bad after getting it.

Between her time as a cook at the former Landmark hotel and several years as an intake worker for the state’s welfare department, a job that she retired from around 2004, Reed served four years in Nevada prison for drug possession with intent to sell.

She worked as a self-advocate to reduce her sentence and then to restore rights and normalcy for all ex-felons. She even had the ear of Nevada icon Sen. Harry Reid, Payne said.

The Nevada Legislature approved a bill last year to restore ex-felons’ voting rights, allowing Reed to vote this year for the first time since 1988. On Oct. 3, she paid it forward when she set up well-spaced tables in her front yard and helped about 25 people register.

“I definitely think her fight and her voice and her opinions allowed me to be outspoken,”

Payne said. “I definitely believe it made me stronger as a person. It made me independent as a person, and to kind of carry that on and instill those same qualities in my girls.”

Reed started feeling sick around Nov. 12, not long before her 63rd birthday. She spent a day in the hospital, was given medicine and told to go home and rest. Within a couple of days, she had to return.

Payne felt compelled to call her mother over video chat after midnight Nov. 29. She told her she loved her. They hung up at around 1 a.m., and at 1:47, a nurse called to say Reed had gone into respiratory arrest. She had died.

“If you met my mom one time or if you had known her for years you were truly, truly blessed,” Payne said. “You had truly met an amazing force of nature. Smart, intelligent, well-spoken, outspoken. Witty, funny, clever. She was just so many things.”

Reed crafted the recipes that fueled the tamales “club” she ran for 16 years, accessed after paying an upfront fee. Tamales are notoriously labor-intensive, but she was particular. Payne sometimes would let her older daughter help to assemble the finished product, but the exact preparation of the beef, turkey and, if you were lucky, chicken tamales, stayed in Reed’s head. They were as good as her potato salad.

Clark County Commissioner Lawrence Weekly knew the woman he referred to as “Ms. Lolo” not only as one of his community liaisons but as a frequent caller on his radio show on KCEP 88.1.

Weekly offered his condolences on behalf of the county at the commission’s Dec. 1 meeting. He urged people to wear masks, socially distance, and wash their hands to “do what we can to help save each other.”

“It’s real, man,” he said, clearly taken aback by Reed’s death. “It hit home for so many of us who are very close to Lois Reed.”

Lois Reed