Newly obtained surveillance footage shows Nick Reiner skulking outside a gas station near his parents’ Brentwood home just hours before they were found brutally murdered on Sunday.
The video, obtained by The New York Post, shows Reiner, 32, calmly strolling down the street in the opposite direction of his parents’ home just before midnight on Saturday, wearing blue jeans, a baseball cap, and a long-sleeved shirt.
He had been spotted attending a Christmas party with his parents, Hollywood director Rob Reiner and wife Michele, earlier that evening, but was reportedly booted after clashing with them. The couple was found stabbed to death the next day.
Authorities have not yet pinpointed the exact time of their murder but said it happened late Saturday or very early Sunday.
Their bodies were first discovered by a massage therapist visiting the couple’s home on Sunday afternoon, according to a source cited by The New York Times. After being unable to gain access to the property, the therapist alerted the Reiners’ daughter Romy, 28, who entered the house and discovered her father’s body.
Romy fled the house “in anguish” after discovering her father’s body, the Times reported, without realizing her mother’s body was also inside. Emergency responders later discovered Michele’s body while inspecting the crime scene.
The source also disputed some of the more salacious details of Reiner’s appearance at Conan O’Brien’s Christmas party, claiming reports of Nick’s “erratic” behavior had been overblown, and that the family was “accustomed to working through Nick’s problems together.”
Nick Reiner was being well supported by his family as he grappled with drug addiction and mental health problems, the source said.
Reiner, who lives at a guesthouse on the property, was not at the scene of the crime when authorities arrived. He was later found to have checked in to a Santa Monica hotel around 4 a.m. Sunday morning, according to TMZ, with eyewitnesses claiming he appeared “tweaked out” and left a “shower full of blood” and blood-stained bedsheets in the room.
Reiner was arrested at 9:15 p.m. on Sunday, with dramatic, since-deleted scenes posted by the LAPD Gang & Narcotics Unit showing a swarm of armed officers apprehending him as he walked down the street near Exposition Park, around 15 miles away from his home. It is not clear how officers located him.
Nick Reiner has been charged with two counts of first-degree murder for the killings. He is being held without bail, and has hired well-known criminal defense attorney Alan Jackson, who has represented Kevin Spacey and Harvey Weinstein, to defend him.
“Rob Reiner was one of the greatest film-makers of his generation. His murder and his wife of more than 35 years Michele Singer Reiner’s murder are shocking and tragic,” said Nathan Hochman, LA county’s district attorney, in a press release announcing the charges. “We owe it to their memory to pursue justice and accountability for the lives that were taken.”
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