How can I reap a zombie process that is not a child of my shell?

I have a server with a ton of zombie processes. Almost a thousand. If possible, I would like to reap these processes because it doesn't seem like the parent (one parent is causing all 1000 zombies) is going to call the wait function. I see bash has a builtin wait function, but when I use it to try to reap one of the zombies, I get the following error. # wait 17517 bash: wait: pid 17517 is not a child of this shell I am root, but that does not seem to make a difference. I have a couple questions 1. Can I reap a zombie process if it is not the child of my shell? 2. If not, is there anything I can do? I am not certain I should kill the parent 3. Should I be worried? It seems the parent has a resource leak and is not garbage collecting or whatever.