The son of the legendary actor and director Rob Reiner and the photographer Michele Reiner made his first court appearance on Wednesday after being charged with two counts of first-degree murder in the grisly stabbing deaths of his parents at the family’s Los Angeles home on Dec. 14.
Nick Reiner, 32, appeared in a padded blue suicide-prevention gown with a shackle around his waist. His arms were bare. He was seated in a plexiglass-enclosed pen for the brief morning hearing. When his lawyer asked to postpone his plea until Jan. 7, the judge asked if Nick agreed to waive his right to a speedy arraignment.
“Yes, your honor,” Nick replied, making it clear he was capable of following the proceeding. Nick was looking down when the media filed into the courtroom and was mostly stoic but appeared to smile at his three lawyers at one point, as they stood outside the holding pen. His lead defense lawyer, Alan Jackson, is a former Deputy District Attorney in Los Angeles who previously represented Harvey Weinstein in his California criminal trial.
“There may or may not be identification issues,” Jackson told the judge as she considered allowing the media to photograph Nick. Jackson was reserving the defense’s right to claim Nick did not kill his parents. The judge subsequently ruled the cameras could not photograph Nick.
“We don’t want to plead at this juncture, it’s too early,” Jackson later told the court. The judge continued the arraignment to Jan. 7. Nick stood up at the end of the hearing and slowly lumbered through a back door, surrounded by deputies. He remains in custody without bail.
Nick Reiner appeared in court wearing blue suicide-prevention gown, did not enter a plea
“This is a devastating tragedy,” his lawyer Alan Jackson said. “There are very, very complex and serious issues that are associated with this case.”
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“This is a devastating tragedy that has befallen the Reiner family. We all recognize that,” Jackson said in a statement outside the courthouse after the hearing. “Our hearts go out to the entire Reiner family. There are very, very complex and serious issues that are associated with this case. They need to be thoroughly but very carefully dealt with and examined and looked at and analyzed.” Jackson declined to answer follow-up questions.
“Words cannot even begin to describe the unimaginable pain we are experiencing every moment of the day. The horrific and devastating loss of our parents, Rob and Michele Reiner, is something that no one should ever experience. They weren’t just our parents; they were our best friends,” Rob and Michele Reiner’s children, Jake and Romy, said in a statement. “We are grateful for the outpouring of condolences, kindness, and support we have received not only from family and friends but people from all walks of life. We now ask for respect and privacy, for speculation to be tempered with compassion and humanity, and for our parents to be remembered for the incredible lives they lived and the love they gave.”
At a press conference on Tuesday, prosecutors sidestepped a question about whether Nick had a history of mental illness, separate from his admitted struggles with addiction. “If there is evidence of mental illness, it will be presented in court and in whatever detail the defense seeks to do that,” DA Nathan Hochman said.
If convicted as charged, Nick faces a potential sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole, or the death penalty, Hochman said Tuesday. Prosecutors have also filed a special allegation that Nick personally used a dangerous and deadly weapon, “that being a knife.” Hochman said his office was still considering whether to seek the death penalty. Gov. Gavin Newsom currently has a moratorium on executions in California.
Police responded to the Reiners’ Brentwood home around 3:40 p.m. Sunday for a death investigation. The Reiners’ daughter Romy, 28, discovered the grisly scene, Rolling Stone previously confirmed.
Police said Tuesday that a manhunt for Nick after the alleged murders led them to Exposition Park, near the University of Southern California, where they took Nick into custody without incident around 9:15 p.m. Sunday. They declined to answer questions about a possible motive. Nick remained in custody without bail pending his first appearance, set for Wednesday. Jackson confirmed to Rolling Stone on Tuesday that he is representing Nick and that his client had not been “medically cleared” to be transported to court on Tuesday.
Rob Reiner, the son of late comedian Carl Reiner, played Meathead in the groundbreaking sitcom All in the Family. He later directed This is Spinal Tap, Stand by Me, When Harry Met Sally…, The Princess Bride, and A Few Good Men, before working with Nick on the 2016 movie Being Charlie. Nick co-wrote the script, loosely based on his struggles with heroin addiction, and Reiner directed the film.
Nick told People in 2016 that he was 15 when he first went to rehab. He said more than a dozen stints at recovery centers followed, and he experienced homelessness in Maine, New Jersey, and Texas.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, the Reiners said they desperately tried to help their son, but navigating his care was challenging. “The program works for some people, but it can’t work for everybody,” Reiner said. “When Nick would tell us that it wasn’t working for him, we wouldn’t listen. We were desperate, and because the people had diplomas on their wall, we listened to them when we should have been listening to our son.”
Michele added that the couple was “so influenced by these people. They would tell us he’s a liar, that he was trying to manipulate us. And we believed them.”
Being Charlie tells the story of the troubled, drug-addicted son of an actor with political aspirations in California. In a video interview with AOL’s BUILD Series in 2016, Rob Reiner called the movie the most personal and “satisfying creative experience” of his career.
“The fact that we were dealing with things that Nick had gone through and how I had related to it, and how his mother had related to it … It forced me to have to see more clearly and understand more deeply what Nick had gone through. And I think it forced him to see things that I had experienced during this process. And it definitely brought us closer together,” Reiner said. “It did make me understand him a lot more.”
Nick called the movie a “bonding” experience with his dad. “I think the bonding came, not from the story itself, but from the fact that we were working on a movie together, and I could see him in, I think, the form that he could express himself the best, which is making movies, because he has so much experience,” he said. “Seeing that sort of turned me around to be like, OK, I should probably shut up and listen to him because he knows a lot more about this. I don’t know anything. So, I’ll learn whatever it is that he has to teach me.”
From Rolling Stone US
