MEMPHIS, Tenn. – Police say a woman armed with a hammer and knife took $3,000 from her mother’s safe and chased her mother and brother with the weapons when they tried to stop her from leaving with the money.
Reva Lowe, 36, is facing two counts of aggravated assault, theft, and vandalism following the incident last month at her mother’s house on Appleton Avenue in Whitehaven.
Court records show this is the sixth time Lowe has been charged with assault over the last 15 years.
“She used the hammer to bust open the safe,” said her brother Sidney Martin.
Martin told officers Lowe also destroyed his television and dresser. He said his sister got angry when he refused to move their mother’s car so she could get out of the driveway.
“She hit the back of my mother’s car with the hammer,’ said Martin.
Martin, who is nearly twenty years younger than his sister, had no idea she had been arrested so many times before.
In 2009, Lowe was sentenced to five days in jail after punching and choking her mother and breaking out several windows in her mother’s apartment during a fight over a car.
In 2015, she was sentenced to three years in prison after hitting another woman in the head with a beer bottle.
In 2021, she was charged with attempted aggravated assault after her mother said she damaged her vehicle with a hammer and another object and chased her with the hammer. The charge was later dropped.
Lowe’s brother said his sister is bipolar and schizophrenic and refuses to take her medication. He said he and his mother don’t want her anywhere near their house again.
“I don’t feel safe. No one should have to live like this,” Martin said.
Police don’t mention any mental illnesses in any of the many affidavits.
Lowe is being held on a $20,000 bond. However, Martin said they wouldn’t be bailing her out of jail.
