‘Just like so many families’: US parents of addicted kids relate to the Reiners – but fear stigma | US news

When news broke that Rob and Michele Singer Reiner had been killed and a possible suspect was their son, Nick Reiner, who had struggled with addiction and mental health issues, it brought addiction back into the public spotlight. But parents who have been affected by their children’s addiction fear the conversation will focus on the exceedingly rare act of violence instead of the more widespread risks.

Ron Grover and his wife, Darlene, have been glued to the news. They only knew the Reiners by their work, but they feel a connection: Grover’s son also became addicted at 15 to opioids and then heroin, much like Nick Reiner, and he was in and out of rehab and jail for years. But after seven excruciating years, Grover’s son got sober in July 2010.

“It’s just tragic,” Grover says of the Reiner family’s story. “It tears you up, because that’s a family destroyed, just like so many other families that we know that their sons or daughters or loved ones didn’t survive the disease of addiction.”

More than two-thirds of Americans say their lives have been touched by addiction – either they or a family member has “been addicted to alcohol or drugs, experienced homelessness due to addiction, or experienced a drug overdose leading to an emergency room visit, hospitalization, or death”, the health non-profit KFF found in 2023.

About one in six Americans – 16.8%, or 48.4 million people – had substance use disorder in 2024, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

“This can happen to anybody, no matter how rich you are, no matter how poor you are, no matter how powerful you are,” Grover said.

The Reiner story struck a chord with Greg, the chair of Families Anonymous, whose son has addiction.

“We talk a lot about how it’s a family disease,” Greg said. “It has a tremendous impact on others’ lives.”

But he’s worried that the murders will make people “very wary of anybody who’s admitted to having an addiction, and think that they could become violent at any point in time. And that’s not true,” Greg said.

These “are really important conversations to have, since addiction is so prevalent in the United States and the rates have continually increased”, said Colleen Berryessa, an associate professor at the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice, who studies addiction and criminal justice. But there is a lot of stigma about addiction and mental health generally in the US, including the “idea of someone being really dangerous and the potential for harming others”, she said.

She also cautioned against jumping to conclusions about Nick Reiner’s alleged role in the crimes and his state at the time; it’s not clear whether he had been using substances or experiencing mental health issues recently. In September, Rob Reiner said Nick hadn’t done drugs in more than six years.

“I’m afraid that people are going to take their stigmatization of addiction and substance use disorder, and fill in the gaps to try to make sense of what happened,” Berryessa said. “Because of his history, the first thing that everyone is talking about is his addiction.”

Addiction can make people act unpredictably, and some people using substances like alcohol or meth may become aggressive, Berryessa said. But a brutal act like the Reiner double homicide is highly unusual.

“The huge majority of people with addiction or substance use disorder do not ever show anything remotely close to violent behavior. It’s a real rarity,” Berryessa said. “The actual reality is a person is significantly more likely to hurt themselves and harm themselves than anyone else.”

Greg and Grover have both been afraid – not of their sons, but for them.

“I’m afraid he’s going to die at some point,” Greg said, his voice growing quieter. “If he relapses or uses again, it’s eventually going to kill him. That’s my biggest fear. And my other fear, I guess, is just being estranged from him.” One of the hardest decisions parents make when their adult children are in the throes of addiction is how to set boundaries, such as making the “horribly painful” decision that they can’t live at home, Greg said.

“Our fear then was, every single night you laid your head down on the pillow, that you could get that call or that knock on the door telling you that he was never coming home,” said Grover, a retired manufacturing manager who lives in Missouri. Those fears are present “every single day, 365 days a year, for a parent”, Grover said.

“The calls at night from a hospital saying: ‘Your son was dropped at the emergency room door, and when we got to him, he was unconscious and not breathing.’ The calls from jail – you kind of justify stuff in your mind as a parent: ‘Well, at least my son shoplifted to support his habit; at least he wasn’t breaking into the neighbors’ houses.’”

Parents feel loneliness, too – wondering if the addiction stemmed from some parental failure; feeling responsible for a child’s actions, no matter how old they are; worrying about judgment from others, of both parent and child.

It’s very difficult to understand what a family is going through without having been through it yourself, Greg said, adding: “With addiction, it can change on the spot. You could be perfectly happy one day and miserable the next, depending on what happens. So, in the Reiner family, it’s possible that they were a perfectly happy family a month before, all together and enjoying each other, and then this tragedy happens a month later. It’s not unusual for that to happen.”

About three in four people with addiction are able to become sober.

“Just as you can get over any other type of disease, you can get over this disease, too. You can recover and be successful,” said Grover. “If you work at it and you fail at it, you get up and work at it some more.”

Today, his son is a husband and a father, who has a college degree and works as a union electrician. Grover struggled with wanting to “fix” his son, but said that wasn’t possible.

“I can drag him into recovery if I want to, but if he doesn’t reach [for] my hand for help, it’s not going to work,” he said.

Yet “we always told him we loved him. We always told him we believed in him,” he said.

“I tell any parent or anybody else that’s dealing with someone addicted to drugs: make sure your hand is always, always extended, because you never know when they’ll reach out and take it.”