Rob Reiner and his wife got into a “very loud argument” with their troubled son at Conan O’Brien’s Christmas party—mere hours before police say they were killed in their Los Angeles home, insiders said.
Nick Reiner, 32, was arrested Monday morning and charged with murder in connection with his parents’ grisly throat slitting.
Family sources told TMZ that Rob, 78, and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, 68, left the Saturday night party after the fight. It is unclear when Nick departed.
The couple was discovered dead in their Brentwood home on Sunday afternoon.
The Reiners were reportedly at their “wits’ end” with Nick, who bounced between rehab and homelessness as a teenager and has continued to suffer from mental health issues and drug addiction, sources said.
A longtime neighbor of the Reiners told the New York Post that this “is not the first time their son has been violent.”
“I know of another incident a few years back with Nick, but I won’t say more than that,” the neighbor told the paper. “I just never thought it would ever get to this point.”
The neighbor added, “Nick has had demons for the longest. It is such a nightmare. The whole thing is a tragedy.”
An ex-classmate of Nick’s told the Post she “instantly knew” that he was behind his parents’ slaying when their deaths were announced as a homicide.
Sources told TMZ that Michele felt the couple had done all they could.
“We’ve tried everything,” she reportedly said.
It is unclear what Nick, now being held on a $4 million bail, argued with his parents about at the Christmas party. Sources told The Los Angeles Times that “many people noticed Nick acting strangely” at the gathering. The paper also noted that an argument broke out between the director and his son.
Fiery disagreements were common between Nick and his parents. The trio laid their rocky relationship bare in the 2015 film Being Charlie, which Nick co-wrote and was inspired by his own experiences with drug addiction and familial struggles. His dad directed the film.
While Rob hailed the filmmaking process of Being Charlie as “cathartic” and “therapeutic,” Nick said that it all became “overwhelming for me.”
Nick was in and out of rehab centers and experienced bouts of homelessness in three different states—Maine, New Jersey, and Texas—as a teen. He said his parents were placing him in centers across the country against his wishes.
Rob said in 2015 that he regretted listening to counselors more than he did to Nick’s own feelings. He said directing Being Charlie, which he said was the “most personal” of his long list of films, made him realize his own shortcomings as a father.
“When Nick would tell us that it wasn’t working for him, we wouldn’t listen,” he told the LA Times. “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.”
Now, police say that Nick—the middle child of his biological siblings—is the man behind his parents’ shocking murder, which has left the entire country, aside from President Donald Trump, in mourning.
