Nick Reiner appeared in court Wednesday as prosecutors revealed that the final autopsy reports for his slain parents Rob and Michele Reiner were not yet complete.
The son, accused of fatally stabbing his filmmaker dad and photographer-philanthropist mom, sat at a defense table wearing a bright yellow jail shirt, blue pants, a waist shackle, and a closely cropped beard. He blinked repeatedly but appeared to follow the proceeding and waive an immediate preliminary hearing. The judge set a follow-up hearing for Sept. 15.
When asked if he understood that he retained the right to speed up the process if he wants, Nick turned to his public defender, Kimberly Greene. After they briefly discussed the situation, he told the judge, “yeah.”
Deputy District Attorney Jonathan Chung said two terabytes of evidence would be handed over to the defense by the end of day and that the autopsy reports were “still not ready.” After the hearing, a spokesman for the DA’s office said he had no information on when the reports might be completed.
Reiner, 32, pleaded not guilty in February to charges he fatally stabbed his parents inside the family’s Brentwood home. He was arrested Dec. 14, 2025, just hours after his parents were found dead in the primary bedroom of the house. Both died from “multiple sharp force injuries,” according to the county medical examiner. Nick was charged with two counts of first-degree murder, with prosecutors identifying the alleged murder weapon as a knife.
After the slayings, Nick’s struggles with mental health and drug addiction made headlines. Four days after the arrest, sources confirmed to Rolling Stone that Nick had been treated for schizophrenia before the shocking double homicide. He was also diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, which combines psychotic symptoms with mood disturbances, and was placed in a confidential conservatorship in 2020, The New York Times reported. The newspaper further reported Nick had been on psychiatric medication as part of his treatment and that the medication appeared to be working, but that side effects led him to switch to something different about a month before his parents were killed.
Police records obtained by Rolling Stone show officers responded to the family’s home twice in 2019, including a welfare check and a call described as a “mental” incident. At his first court appearance on Dec. 17, Reiner wore a suicide-prevention gown and waist shackles.
The night before the killings, the Reiners attended a holiday party hosted by Conan O’Brien. Afterward, O’Brien described them as “such lovely people” and said learning of their deaths the next day left him in shock.
Nick Reiner had spoken publicly in the past about addiction, telling People magazine he entered rehab at 15 and cycled through more than a dozen programs. He later co-wrote a script based on his struggles that became the 2016 film Being Charlie, directed by his father. On a 2018 podcast, Reiner recalled a violent episode during a drug binge in which he trashed his parents’ guest house and later suffered what he described as a cocaine-induced heart attack. His behavior at the time, he said, had “no logic.”
In a 2015 interview with The Los Angeles Times, his parents said they struggled to manage his care. “We were desperate,” Rob Reiner said. “We listened to them when we should have been listening to our son.”
In an essay posted to Substack on April 24, Nick’s older brother, Jake Reiner, described the “living nightmare” he and sister Romy have endured over the last four months. “Nothing can prepare you for what it feels like to lose both parents instantly at the same time,” he wrote, calling the tragedy “too devastating to comprehend.”
“We lost more than half of our family that night in the most violent way imaginable,” he wrote, a subtle suggestion he now considers his brother Nick lost too. “Sure, any loss of a parent is devastating, but nothing compares to losing both of them at the same time and, on top of that, having your brother be at the center of it. It’s almost too impossible to process.
“I understand that people have questions about what happened,” he continued. “Some of those answers will come in time. But some parts of this belong only to our family, and keeping them private is the only way to protect what little remains of something that was taken from us.”
