RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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See the full story · 5 sourcesNearly nine months after the shocking and tragic killing of Rob and Michele Reiner, their son, Jake, sat for an exclusive interview with ABC News. In his first comments since his parents’ death, Jake Reiner, the eldest of the three Reiner children, shares the horrific experience of receiving a call from his sister Romy, who discovered their parents’ bodies. Jake and Romy’s brother, Nick Reiner, is currently awaiting trial for their deaths. Charged with two counts of first-degree murder, he has pleaded not guilty.
Reiner spoke with the Los Angeles ABC News affiliate for more than an hour, with a brief, three-minute excerpt from the exclusive interview being released online. In the clip, Reiner goes through the moment his sister, who lived in an apartment across the street, called him after discovering her parents’ bodies. “Romy told me our dad was dead, and then she said, ‘I can’t find mom,'” Reiner said. “I immediately went into shock.”
“As a reporter, I did it for 10 years, I came up on crime scenes all the time,” Reiner continued, in a report from ABC, “but when it’s your crime scene, a crime scene at your childhood home, it’s like the most surreal thing I’ve ever seen.”
No matter how it’s explained or what facts come out, he will “never understand why this happened,” Reiner said. “I can tell you they never stopped wanting to help [Nick]. They never stopped helping him. And I think that that project was a way for my dad to try and connect with him.” Reiner hasn’t spoken to his brother, nor has he attended any of his court hearings—though he testified before a grand jury.
“I’ve got to be honest,” he said. “It’s been 8 months. It feels like 8 years at the same time, and it also feels like 8 minutes, because every moment that I wake up, I’m reminded of my reality, and you’re living through that every single day.”
“The worst kind of grief is your own because you’re the one living through it,” he said. “And so, just because I lost my parents in the way that I did, it doesn’t mean that ‘you’ losing a loved one in some other way is not also devastating. You can’t compare it, because it’s what you’re going through, and there are a lot of people out there that are living through that, and I think for the first time in my life, I see them.”
Reiner, whom ABC made clear would only answer questions he felt comfortable with and that he could speak to legally, has spent much of the last year in grief counseling. His sister opted not to speak to the press. Both lost more than half of their immediate family in the killing, ABC7’s Marc Cota-Robles noted. With his parents dead and his younger brother in jail, Reiner continued, “It’s, like, I physically lost my parents, and then Nick was arrested. Now it’s just me and Romy.”
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