Billy Crystal and his wife, Janice, arrived at Rob and Michele Reiner’s Brentwood home within minutes of a family member discovering the couple dead inside, and saw their bodies before the scene was secured by police, according to a TMZ report citing sources “with direct knowledge” of the timeline.
TMZ reported that Rob and Michele Reiner’s daughter, Romy, phoned Crystal and his wife shortly after calling police on Sunday to report finding her parents “brutally murdered” at the property. The outlet said Crystal and Janice “raced over” and arrived so quickly that, according to one source, they saw their “slain friends” and wanted to say goodbye.
The account has added a highly personal detail to a case that has prompted widespread shock in Hollywood and beyond, and is now centred on a criminal investigation involving the couple’s adult son. Rob Reiner, 78, the actor, director and outspoken political commentator, and Michele Singer Reiner, 68, a photographer, producer and activist, were found dead in their Los Angeles home on Sunday afternoon. A 32-year-old man identified as their son, Nick Reiner, has been arrested on suspicion of murder, according to multiple US reports.
Police have not publicly released full details of what investigators believe happened inside the home, but the deaths were treated as a homicide investigation from the outset. The Associated Press reported that investigators believed the couple suffered stab wounds.
A local fire department response was logged shortly after 3.30pm on Sunday, according to reporting that cited official statements. When emergency crews arrived, they found a 78-year-old man and a 68-year-old woman dead inside.
Authorities moved quickly to locate the couple’s son. TMZ reported that Nick Reiner was found about six hours after the bodies were discovered and arrested on suspicion of murder, and that he was being held without bail and placed on suicide watch.
In a separate report, police chief Jim McDonnell was quoted as saying the son was arrested and “booked for murder.”
The Reiners’ deaths have triggered an outpouring of tributes and grief, alongside growing public scrutiny of the known timeline, the family’s recent contacts and the question of how a close friend such as Crystal could have arrived before police secured the scene. TMZ’s version suggests the Crystals were contacted directly by Romy Reiner as she sought immediate support after making the emergency call.
The human implications of that moment have been widely discussed online, including in reactions to TMZ’s Facebook post, where commenters questioned why anyone would be allowed near the property if it were a crime scene, while others argued that the daughter’s instinct would have been to call people she trusted most. Those reactions have not been independently verified, but they reflect the intense public focus on the sequence of events in the hours after the discovery.
The Reiner family’s grief has also become part of the public record through statements shared by entertainment outlets and on social media. A post shared by Variety quoted a family statement beginning: “It is with profound sorrow that we announce the tragic passing of Michele and Rob Reiner.”
Former US president Barack Obama posted on X that he and Michelle Obama were “heartbroken by the tragic passing of Rob Reiner and his beloved wife, Michele,” adding: “Rob’s achievements in film and television gave us some of our most cherished stories on screen.”
Rob Reiner’s public profile spans decades in American entertainment. He first became widely known as Mike “Meathead” Stivic on the 1970s sitcom All in the Family, before building a directing career that included This Is Spinal Tap, Stand by Me, The Princess Bride, Misery and When Harry Met Sally. Reports following the deaths have restated the scale of that career while emphasising that the investigation remains ongoing and that the arrested suspect is presumed innocent.
Michele Singer Reiner was a photographer whose work included high-profile assignments and film-related projects. The Associated Press described her as an acclaimed photographer, producer and LGBTQ+ rights advocate, and reported that she met Rob Reiner while working as a photographer on the set of When Harry Met Sally, a connection that the report said helped inspire the film’s famously romantic ending.
The AP report also described Michele Singer Reiner’s activism, including her involvement with marriage equality efforts in California through the American Foundation for Equal Rights during the fight over Proposition 8. It said her commitment to justice was shaped in part by family history, including that her mother was a Holocaust survivor.
The couple married in 1989 and had three children together, including Nick and Romy. Tracy Reiner, Rob Reiner’s adopted daughter from his previous marriage to Penny Marshall, also spoke publicly after the deaths, saying: “I’m in shock.”
As the investigation has unfolded, attention has also returned to what was publicly known about Nick Reiner, who is now at the centre of the case. The Associated Press reported that Rob Reiner had previously spoken about his son’s addiction struggles as a teenager, and that the father and son later appeared to have rebuilt their relationship.
The case also highlights how quickly personal networks are activated after traumatic events, particularly among families with long-standing friendships in the entertainment industry. Crystal and Reiner were contemporaries whose careers intersected in Hollywood’s overlapping circles, and TMZ’s reporting suggests the Crystals were treated as immediate family-level support rather than distant colleagues.
For investigators, the earliest minutes after a death is discovered can matter because of the risk of contamination, incomplete recollections and the emotional volatility of witnesses and loved ones. Authorities have not publicly said whether anyone besides family and first responders entered the property before police fully established a perimeter, and the TMZ report provides only a limited account, relying on unnamed sources.
The public record at this stage points to a Sunday afternoon discovery, an emergency response, and an arrest later that day. Much remains unconfirmed, including the precise cause of death, the sequence of events inside the home and what evidence underpinned the decision to arrest Nick Reiner on suspicion of murder.
For now, the detail that has cut through most sharply is the one described by TMZ: that one of the couple’s closest friends arrived so quickly that he and his wife saw the bodies before police took full control of the scene, a moment that, if accurate, underlines the scale of the trauma for those closest to the Reiner family.
