A Fort Washington-area clergyman and the mother of one of his children will spend the next 1 1/2 years in prison for conspiring to steal more than $500,000 from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, a judge has ruled.
Karen L. Parish worked at the patent office until 2005. By the time she left, she and Michael Reid had used Reid’s company, Redeemed Music House LLC, to funnel $534,338 from dormant patent office accounts used by businesses to cover patent application costs, the two admitted earlier this year.
Reid is an ordained minister who serves as the music director at Soul Factory in Forestville and the Ark of Safety Christian Church in Upper Marlboro. He and Parish met while attending a church in Washington in 1990, Parish wrote in a sworn statement filed in Alexandria’s federal court. Before their daughter was born in 1994, their relationship soured and the two split. Eventually, they became friends again.
In the late 1990s, both Reid and Parish fell on hard times, court documents said. Reid lost more than $20,000 when an investment in a 7-Eleven franchise failed. The costs of raising a daughter and other expenses left Parish about $8,000 behind in her taxes. Her wages were garnished and she was coming up short on her electric bill.
That’s when Parish took a close look at the patent office’s refund process for the dormant accounts, she said in the statement. She knew she needed someone else in on the scheme or she would be quickly discovered. The only person Parish could trust was Reid, and she was able to convince him to get involved, she wrote.
“I remember the first time I took money from the Deposit Account, I felt almost like a prostitute,” Parish wrote.
Over the next several years, she changed the names on dozens of accounts to Redeemed Music House and sent the cash to Reid, court documents said. He returned the bulk of the funds to Parish.
“It was done quite easy since I didn’t need a lot of verification,” Parish wrote.
She says she used the cash to pay off bills and cover expenses for her daughter.
Now, she and Reid will have to pay it all back, a judge ordered Friday.
