Los Angeles prosecutors on Tuesday announced murder charges against Nick Reiner, days after prosecutors say he fatally stabbed his parents — Hollywood legend Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner— inside their Brentwood home.
Los Angeles police responded to the Reiner home in the 200 block of Chadbourne Avenue about 3:40 p.m. Sunday after the couple’s daughter found her parents, law enforcement sources confirmed to The Times. Hours later, at around 9:15 p.m., authorities caught up with Nick Reiner, 32, in South Los Angeles near USC and took him into custody, according to another law enforcement source who was not authorized to speak publicly.
Reiner is being held without bail at Twin Towers Jail and is considered a suicide risk and was placed under special supervision, a law enforcement source told The Times.
Reiner was scheduled to appear in court on Tuesday morning, according to jail records, but his attorney Alan Jackson said he had not been “medically cleared” to be transported from the jail.
“We’ll be back day to day,” he told reporters outside Los Angeles County Superior Court. “The bailiff has indicated that the sheriff’s department will take it on a day by day basis, so hopefully he will be cleared tomorrow.”
Jackson, one of the most highly sought after defense attorneys, has represented a host of famous clients, including Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey. While Jackson and his partner, Mark Werksman, failed to win an acquittal for Weinstein at his 2022 rape trial in L.A., he has had major success in other high-profile trials. Earlier this year, Jackson secured an acquittal on second degree murder charges for Karen Read, who was charged with killing her boyfriend, a Boston police officer.
Authorities have not provided any details about a possible motive in the case. But family friends told The Times that Rob and Nick Reiner got into an argument at a holiday party at talk show host Conan O’Brien’s home Saturday evening. Many party guests noticed Nick acting strangely, the friends said, but it’s not clear what they were arguing about.
The younger Reiner, who struggled with addiction for years, was living in a guesthouse on his parents’ property and his mother had become increasingly concerned about his mental health in recent weeks, a family friend said.
It remains unclear when the Reiners were killed. Michelle Obama revealed that she and Barack Obama planned to meet with Reiners that Sunday evening.
“We were supposed to be seeing them that night,” she told Jimmy Kimmel on his show Monday. “Rob and Michele Reiner are some of the most decent, courageous people you ever want to know.”
A source familiar with the investigation said Nick Reiner was staying at the Pierside Santa Monica hotel on Sunday. A hotel employee said he had “no information” when reached by the Times on Tuesday. Representatives for the hotel have not responded to multiple requests for comment.
Actor Billy Crystal, a longtime friend and collaborator of Rob Reiner, was one of the first people family members reached out to after calling 911, according to sources familiar with the events.
He arrived at the scene Sunday evening to comfort family members, according to a family friend and a law enforcement source. Crystal was described as devastated by the violent turn of events and left the home in tears.
The challenges the Reiners’ faced with their son have played out partially in the public spotlight. In interviews, Nick Reiner has described cycling in and out of rehab and experiencing bouts of homelessness as a teenager.
By 2015, Nick Reiner had gotten clean, working with his father on “Being Charlie,” a semi-autobiographical film about a successful actor with political ambitions and a son addicted to drugs. In public, Nick praised his parents for helping him find sobriety. But he also said he felt guilty disappointing them and was trying to figure out his own path.
But Nick Reiner has struggled with maintaining his sobriety. In an August 2018 interview on “Dopey”, a podcast about addiction and recovery, he said he was smoking pot, “as a preventative measure” to stop himself from doing harder drugs, and also taking Adderall.
He described wrecking his parents’ guesthouse about a year earlier “totally spun out on uppers.”
“I think it was coke and something else — and I was up for days on end, and I started punching out different things in my guesthouse,” including a TV, he said.
The incident, he said, happened around the time his parents told him he had to get out and go to rehab.
Times staff writer Clara Harter contributed to this report
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