Nick Reiner: What Happened At That Party Hours Before

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Drake.

**Robin Drake** (0:07)
To Nick Reiner case.
And this one does hit differently because everybody thought they knew the ending before the story even started. Rob Reiner spent five decades making America laugh and think, and then he and his wife, Michele, were found stabbed to death in their own Brentwood home, with their own son under arrest before the sun even came up. Since then, it's been nine months of continuances, the defense attorney who bailed out for reasons nobody's allowed to say, although I think we all kind of knew. And now a preliminary hearing pushed all the way to September, while both sides wade through terabytes of evidence. The people writing in aren't asking about court dates either. They're asking the one question that's impossible to shake, and that is, how do you go from meathead and princess bride to your own child accused of ending your life, and can anyone have seen it coming? Your thoughts.

**Todd** (0:56)
Well, I mean, I think we were all surprised to hear the news that night. I was not aware. You know, I was a fan of Rob Reiner, liked him on All in the Family, loved a lot of his movies.

**Robin Drake** (1:08)
Got my goose bumps, yeah, me too.

**Todd** (1:10)
Thought the guy was a genius when it came to creating art in that way, shape or form. Didn't know a lot about the family, and certainly didn't know that Nick was around and had the struggles that he had throughout life with substance abuse and some other things, some mental illness and all that kind of stuff. So when it happened, I was very surprised that it happened. One of the questions we have is, how young was he when he was throwing temper tantrums and things like that? I personally have not seen any information that would necessarily guarantee an exact answer on that. I don't know if either one of you have, but it's a very sad story.
And again, I was not aware of who Nick Reiner was until this all happened.

**Robin Drake** (1:54)
Yeah.
So the research I showed and I did on it was, again, this is just reported from colleagues, friends, family. And to your point, too, we're not going to see these things. But their social group, they're involved with a lot of clubs, groups, organizations, where they were at. Again, just being, I think, in the social end of Hollywood that they were, there was knowns and unknowns. So I don't think he, especially when they made a movie together, a special, it's not like he was hiding his son or hiding his family. So I think they were seen a lot, because what I saw here from my research was, at around the age 11 and before, family and friends and insiders, again, take that with a grain of salt sometimes, they were seen very young age, terrifying tensions and violent outbursts from a very young age.
So again, when we're looking at patterns of behavior and life arcs, as I talk about, the first thing I'm looking for is, is this an enigma? Is this a spike out of the norm of what we saw, what other people were seeing over a period of time or wasn't it? And from everything we're seeing, from what was reported and even the night of the horrendous murders themselves, he had a pattern of violent behavior throughout his entire life. And going unchecked, it's going to keep escalating until some sort of firmer guard rails of some sort are put into place. And this is not any way ever victim blaming in this at all, because hindsight is always 20, 20, when things go sideways. Because we never in a million years do we ever expect we're going to die. And never in a million years do we ever expect some of our life is going to be the cause of that death. And so it's very hard to predict these things.

**Lisa** (3:31)
It's also hard for when a child of, say, the age that we're going to go for is 11 If the child is showing violent tendencies, having these uncontrollable outbreaks and rages, the current mental health processes are not going to jump in and diagnose that as any sort of schizo or schizoaffective disorder because that is a child. And that's part of the problem.
When a child shows those aberrations that early, they don't want to label them in case it's something else. But then again, they're not getting the help if they are early onset schizoaffective or schizophrenia. Do you follow what I'm saying?

**Robin Drake** (4:28)