The son of actors Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner, found dead on Sunday night, he was arrested hours later after the double homicide, according to the The Guardian.
According to initial records, 32-year-old Nick Reiner was charged with “gang-related activity” — a serious crime — and bail was set at four million dollars (around 3.4 million euros). This Monday, the Los Angeles police confirmed that he is suspected of having murdered his parents.
Nick Reiner was arrested after firefighters were alerted to a call for help at the Reiner couple’s residence, around 3:30 pm local time. It was their daughter Romy – her parents’ neighbor – who discovered the bodies.
The couple died due to sharp injuries compatible with an attack carried out with a knife. The homicide was later confirmed in a statement by a family spokesperson: “It is with profound sadness that we announce the tragic deaths of Michele and Rob Reiner. We are devastated by this sudden loss and ask for privacy during this incredibly difficult time.”
Nick Reiner is a screenwriter and previously collaborated with his father on the 2015 film “Being Charlie”, a dramatized version of his story as a heroin addict and the period he lived as a homeless person. Nick, who was already using the drug as a teenager, declared that at the age of 22 he had already undergone more than 17 rehabilitation attempts.
Rob Reiner, who confirmed that a large part of the film is an autobiography, admitted that “when Nick told us that it wasn’t working for him, we didn’t listen to him”. “We were desperate, and because these people had diplomas hanging on the wall, we listened to them when we should have listened to our son,” he told the LA Times.
Nick Reiner, in turn, said he was “tired” of being a drug addict. “I come from a good family. I wasn’t supposed to be out on the streets and in homeless institutions doing all these… things.”
In 2016, he told the weekly magazine “People” that “he had been at home for a long time and that, in a way, he had readjusted to living in Los Angeles and being close to his family”.
Rob and Michele Reiner met during the production of the romantic comedy “When Harry Met Sally”, in 1989. The sentimental relationship that then began, led Rob to beg his screenwriter Nora Ephron to rewrite the ending of the film, so that the fictional couple could end up together.
Michele, also a photographer, even took a photograph of the current North American President, used on the cover of her book “Trump: The Art of Negotiation”, from 1987. Recently, she became a critical voice of the President.