Nick Reiner, arrested for the murder of his father Rob – one of Hollywood's most beloved actors and directors – and his mother Michele, checked into a hotel in Santa Monica early Sunday morning.
TMZ reports: Nick checked into Pierside Santa Monica around 4 a.m. Sunday morning, using his credit card, just hours after a heated argument with his father at Conan O'Brien's Christmas party. The reservation had been made for only one day, but Nick never formally checked out.
When staff entered his room later Sunday morning, they found the shower "full of blood" and blood on the bed. The window was covered with sheets. Nick was eventually located and arrested about 20 miles away, in Exposition Park, near downtown Los Angeles .
A few hours earlier, according to investigators who charged him with double homicide, he slit his parents' throats, leaving them in a pool of blood in their Los Angeles home. Romy, the youngest of the couple's three children, discovered the bodies on Sunday evening. Nick and Rob, it is understood, had had a violent argument Saturday night at Oscar host Conan O'Brien's Christmas party, and Rob, along with Michele, had left the party early. Tragedy struck overnight.
For months, Michele had complained that she and her husband "had tried everything" to get Nick out of the drug addiction that gripped him as a teenager. Nick had repeatedly lived on the streets among the homeless, alternating between being homeless and being the son of a family, in and out of detox clinics. At times, violence erupted, such as when, seized in a guest house under the influence of methamphetamine, he destroyed everything in sight. The family problems inspired Being Charlie, a film directed by Rob and for which Nick wrote the screenplay.
Premiered ten years ago at the Toronto Film Festival, it now offers a roadmap to crime, starring Charlie, the drug-addicted son of David, an accomplished filmmaker with a passion for politics, just like Rob, who resents the way his mother and father forced him into rehab. The plot, the director's relatives told the Hollywood Reporter, closely reflects the interactions between the Reiner parents and their second child.
(Unioneonline/D)
