Reiner killings an ‘unusual form’ of family violence
Northeastern criminal justice and psychology experts said that family relationships can be fraught with conflict.
A family tragedy shocked Hollywood on Sunday when beloved director Rob Reiner and his wife, photographer Michele Singer Reiner, were found dead, allegedly murdered by their son Nick.
Northeastern University criminal justice and psychology experts said the incident was shocking not just because of the victims’ wealth and fame, but because a child allegedly killing not just one, but two parents is extremely uncommon.
“We’re talking about something that is — because of all the different pieces to it — very rare,” said Carlos Cuevas, professor of criminology and criminal justice and co-director of the Violence and Justice Research Lab at Northeastern University. “That it is allegedly a child who perpetrated the violence, and the fact that they were killed, are two things that make it an infrequently occurring event.”
James Alan Fox, a research professor of criminology at Northeastern who has studied family violence, said that only 8% of parricides — or killings of a parent — have multiple victims and 30% involve a knife as the primary weapon.
“Double homicide involving a knife and an adult son as the accused assailant is a rather unusual form of family violence,” Fox said. “That the victims were well-known makes it even more unique.”
Rob and Michele Reiner were found stabbed to death on Sunday afternoon in their Los Angeles home, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. The couple’s 32-year-old son, Nick Reiner, was taken into custody hours later and formally charged with two counts of first-degree murder on Tuesday. He remains held without bail.
Police haven’t shared any information regarding a possible motive for the killings.
Each of the experts interviewed also cautioned that they knew about the Reiner case only from news reports.
Some of the allegations in the case track with statistics that Fox has compiled in a database of homicides from 2010. The database includes 4,967 parricides over that time period.
According to the database, parricides are most likely to be committed by white men — 89% of assailants are male, and 71% are white — and fathers are the most common targets, representing 47.5% of victims.
But perpetrators are more likely to be in their 20s (35%) than in their 30s (25%), according to the database.
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Meanwhile, 43% of parricides involve a gun; only 32% involve a knife, Fox’s statistics show.
In the highly publicized case of Lyle and Erik Menendez, the brothers admitted to fatally shooting their parents in 1989 but maintained the killings were done in self-defense, saying they had been sexually abused by their father and feared for their lives. The brothers were sentenced to life in prison in 1996. In August, they were denied parole.
That the Reiner killings also occurred in a big city is also rather rare, Fox said. The database records only 8.2% of parricides occurred in cities with a population over 1 million.
But experts point out that family relationships can be fraught with conflict.
“I think we tend to underestimate the fact that family relationships are very intimate, highly emotionally-charged relationships,” said Laurie Kramer, professor of applied psychology and professor and director of the counseling psychology Ph.D. program at Northeastern. “They are contexts for a lot of positive, loving emotions, but also sometimes intense negative emotions like frustration and anger. And when people have difficulty regulating the expression of those — especially negative emotions — they can experience a lot of anxiety, depression, anger and aggressive impulses may take over.”
These feelings of anxiety, depression, frustration and more can build over time, Kramer added, referencing what is called “coercion theory.”
Kramer explained coercion theory as when one family member’s attempt to stop another’s negative behavior instead ends up reinforcing that behavior so that it’s more likely to occur in the future.
“Over time, people can get into a cycle where the intensity of their negative responses builds,” Kramer said. “So something that started out with a verbal fight has the potential over time, if it’s not dealt with properly, to escalate into more dangerous situations.”
Add in factors such as a history of substance abuse and trauma and family dynamics can become even more incendiary. Nick and Rob Reiner wrote about the son’s struggles with addiction and periods of homelessness in the semi-autobiographical 2016 film “Being Charlie.”
“Individuals with a history of substance abuse can very often, depending on the family dynamics, be seen as the source of the problem or really be seen as the identified individual in terms of the problem,” Cuevas said. “A lot of times that makes things worse rather than better.”
But even if tension escalated over a long time, that’s not to say that the killings were meticulously planned.
“A lot of times these are situations where the violence was much more impulsive and situational,” Cuevas said.
Ultimately, experts stressed, there is much more that we don’t know than we do.
That doesn’t make it any less of a tragedy, they said.
“All families have conflicts,” Kramer said. “The question is, do they have the skills and competencies to try to resolve those conflicts, or at least manage those conflicts without them becoming dangerous for people?”
