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On December 14, we learned of the violent, untimely deaths of Rob and Michele Reiner. In the days since, their son Nick has been arrested and charged with their murders. If it is ultimately proven that he is responsible, he will have committed parricide, the term for the killing of a parent by their child.
Parricide is rare—it accounts for only 2 percent of all homicides—and the killing of both parents is a tiny percentage (4 to 8 percent) of all parricides. When it happens, we are horrified and deeply saddened, confounded by the extreme violence and loss within a family.
Although single-victim parricide by both adult and juvenile offenders has been studied, relatively little is known about the slaying of both mothers and fathers. One of the first systematic studies using a national database took place only 10 years ago (Fegadel & Heide, 2015), examining the characteristics of the offender, the victims, and the incidents themselves. In the period between 1991 and 2010, 45 incidents were identified, 35 of which were committed by offenders acting alone.
The overwhelming majority of offenders were male and White. Among adult offenders in this study and subsequent ones, the average age was 30 (Bojanic, Flynn et al, 2020). The crimes usually occurred in the parents’ house, and weapons were often blunt, pointed, or sharp objects, or firearms (Divella, Grattagliano et al., 2017).
These facts are descriptive only and do not help us to understand this tragic event. It is the disturbing nature of the underlying drivers of such events that shakes and baffles us. Research suggests a range of motivations and precursors that are often involved. There are some differences between those who kill parents during adolescence and those who do so as adults. Adolescent offenders are most often responding to severe and continuing abuse. We see this in the case of the Menendez brothers, and I saw it in the case of a girl I interviewed for my book, Before Their Crimes: What We’re Misunderstanding about Childhood Trauma, Youth Crime, and the Path to Healing.
Parricides by adult offenders involve serious psychiatric pathologies and dysfunctional family relationships, with drug and alcohol abuse present in 41 percent of cases. Extensive substance use was reported in 20 to 30 percent of double parricides in the national study. Adult offenders are often unemployed and conflicted about dependency on their parents. As we are learning more about the Reiner case, we can see a mix of similar factors at the time of the crime.
One study notes that parricide committed by an adult is often perpetrated in a violent and bloody manner, often with the use of a common household object found in the home (Grattagliano, Romanelli et al., 2017). It has been reported that Rob and Michele Reiner sustained multiple stab wounds and that a great deal of blood was found in the hotel room that Nick Reiner occupied on that night.
Statistics and studies of other cases of parricide can provide context and a kind of general knowledge about contributing factors, but they do not and cannot provide a true understanding of how an individual arrives at the moment of this type of deadly crime. The specific experiences of an individual who murders their parents, the effects of those experiences, and their influence on subsequent development and relationships within the family or with others, can only be learned from the people themselves.
By the time Nick Reiner was 15, the age at which he is said to have begun a long series of entries into and exits from rehab facilities and homelessness episodes, a lot had already happened in his life. Ironically, Rob Reiner knew just how important the early years are—he is the person primarily responsible for the creation of First 5 California, an organization devoted to understanding and enriching the first five years of life for all California children.
We know little about Nick Reiner’s childhood before the downward spiral that began in his teens, or what led to his embrace of drug use. We do know that brain development is still very much underway during adolescence and the early 20s. Inevitably, heavy drug use has an impact on the ongoing development of executive functions (judgment, decision-making, impulse control) and the capacity for self-soothing and empathy. How much damage was done by the drugs he ingested over many years cannot be known.
It is reported that he was receiving treatment for schizophrenia, an illness that frequently comes on in the late teens and 20s for males. Mental illness, especially psychosis, is often a feature of adult parricide. Statistically true, this also makes sense intuitively, given the profoundly transgressive nature of violence toward one’s own parents. Killing your parents seems like a boundary that could not be crossed if you were in full possession of your faculties—your judgment, your impulse control, your very grasp of reality.
The research tells us that Nick Reiner is not unlike many individuals who have committed this unusual crime, in age and circumstance. But it is not possible to arrive at a true understanding of an act of extreme violence without knowledge of the thousands of moments in the experiences and development of this specific individual. There are no villains in this tragedy, only loss and suffering for those who survive, including the perpetrator.
