LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles County prosecutors on Tuesday announced murder charges against Nick Reiner, days after his parents — Hollywood legend Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner— were found stabbed inside their Brentwood home.

Prosecutors said they will file two counts of first degree murder with special circumstances against Nick Reiner on Tuesday afternoon. Reiner, 32, also faces a special allegation that he used a deadly weapon, a knife, in the crime, L.A. County Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman said during a news conference.

“This case is heartbreaking and deeply personal, not only for the Reiner family and their loved ones, but for our entire city,” LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell said during the news conference.

With prosecutors alleging a special circumstance — that Nick Reiner committed multiple homicides — he could face a death sentence or life in prison without the possibility of parole if convicted at trial. Prosecutors have not made a decision on whether to seek capital punishment. That review process can take months, and Hochman has yet to seek death in any case since restoring the office’s pursuit of capital verdicts last year.

Los Angeles police responded to the Reiner home in the 200 block of Chadbourne Avenue about 3:40 p.m. Sunday after the couple’s daughter found her parents with apparent stab wounds, law enforcement sources confirmed to The Times. Hours later, around 9:15 p.m., authorities caught up with Nick Reiner in Exposition Park near the University of Southern California and took him into custody.

Reiner is being held without bail at Twin Towers Jail and is considered a suicide risk and was placed under special supervision, a law enforcement source told The Times. The source spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss the confidential matter.

Reiner was scheduled to appear in court on Tuesday morning, according to jail records, but his attorney Alan Jackson said he had not been “medically cleared” to be transported from the jail. The county’s Correctional Health Services — which handles health care inside the jails — said in a statement that Reiner was “undergoing the standard jail health screening intake process, which is now complete.”

“We’ll be back day to day,” Jackson told reporters outside Los Angeles County Superior Court. “The bailiff has indicated that the Sheriff’s Department will take it on a day-by-day basis, so hopefully he will be cleared tomorrow.”

Jackson, a former L.A. County prosecutor now best known for defending many of the city’s A-listers, has represented Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey. Although Jackson and his partner, Mark Werksman, failed to win an acquittal for Weinstein at his 2022 rape trial in L.A., he has had major success in other high-profile trials. Earlier this year, Jackson secured an acquittal on second-degree murder charges for Karen Read, who was charged with killing her boyfriend, a Boston police officer.

Authorities have not provided any details about a possible motive in the case. But family friends told The Times that Rob and Nick Reiner got into an argument at a holiday party at talk show host Conan O’Brien’s home Saturday evening. Many party guests noticed Nick acting strange, the friends said, but it’s not clear what they were arguing about.

The younger Reiner, who struggled with addiction for years, was living in a guesthouse on his parents’ property, and his mother had become increasingly concerned about his mental health in recent weeks, a family friend said.

It remains unclear exactly when the Reiners were killed or how authorities linked Nick Reiner to the crime.

“We don’t have that kind of specificity yet,” McDonnell said of the timeline of the couple’s death. “We’re waiting on the coroner to be able to try and determine as best they can at this point.”

LAPD officials would not say how they located Reiner when they arrested him Sunday evening. He was taken into custody without incident, according to LAPD Deputy Chief Alan Hamilton, the department’s chief of detectives.

The couple’s bodies were found in the master bedroom of their Brentwood home, LAPD Assistant Chief Dominic Choi said at the department’s weekly commission meeting Tuesday.

A source familiar with the investigation said Nick Reiner was staying at the Pierside Santa Monica hotel on Sunday. Representatives for the hotel have not responded to multiple requests for comment. But a hotel staff member who was not authorized to speak to the media said police have been present at the hotel since Sunday.

Actor Billy Crystal, a longtime friend and collaborator of Rob Reiner, was one of the first people family members reached out to after calling 911, according to sources familiar with the events.

He arrived at the Reiner home Sunday evening to comfort family members, according to a family friend and a law enforcement source. Crystal was described as devastated by the violent turn of events and left the home in tears.

Michelle Obama revealed that she and Barack Obama planned to meet with the Reiners that Sunday evening.

“We were supposed to be seeing them that night,” she told Jimmy Kimmel on his show Monday. “Rob and Michele Reiner are some of the most decent, courageous people you ever want to know.”

The challenges the Reiners faced with their son have played out partially in the public spotlight. In interviews, Nick Reiner has described cycling in and out of rehab and experiencing bouts of homelessness as a teenager.

By 2015, Nick Reiner had gotten clean, working with his father on “Being Charlie,” a semi-autobiographical film about a successful actor with political ambitions and a son addicted to drugs. In public, Nick praised his parents for helping him find sobriety. But he also said he felt guilty disappointing them and was trying to figure out his own path.

He has struggled with maintaining his sobriety. In an August 2018 interview on “Dopey,” a podcast about addiction and recovery, he said he was smoking pot “as a preventative measure” to stop himself from doing harder drugs, and also taking Adderall.

He described wrecking his parents’ guesthouse about a year earlier while “totally spun out on uppers.”

“I think it was coke and something else — and I was up for days on end, and I started punching out different things in my guesthouse,” including a TV, he said.

The incident, he said, happened around the time his parents told him he had to get out and go to rehab.

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(Times staff writer Clara Harter contributed to this report.)

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