Nick Reiner's Conservatorship Ended—Then His Parents Died: Inside California's Mental Health Trap
True Crime Today | Daily True Crime News & Interviews
Tony Brueski
4.2 • 612 Ratings
🗓️ 25 January 2026
⏱️ 52 minutes
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Summary
Nick Reiner was under court-ordered conservatorship in 2020. A judge declared him "gravely disabled." Licensed fiduciary Steven Baer controlled his treatment. The Reiners obtained the most restrictive mental health intervention California law allows. It lasted one year. Four years later, both parents are dead—allegedly killed by the son they fought to help.
The devastating loophole: under California law, if a family provides food, clothing, and shelter for a mentally ill loved one, that person may no longer qualify as "gravely disabled." The Reiners may have lost the conservatorship not because Nick got better—but because they kept caring for him. The system forces families into an impossible choice: abandon your child or lose legal authority to force treatment.
We trace the timeline: 2019 police calls to the Reiner home. Nick's reported schizophrenia diagnosis around 2020. The conservatorship under Steven Baer that ended after one year. The medication change approximately one month before the killings that sources say triggered a "complete break from reality." And we examine why Baer will almost certainly testify—and what his testimony means for Nick's defense.
But the Reiner tragedy exposes a sixty-year failure. Before California's 1967 Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, families could petition courts to hospitalize violent, psychotic relatives. That system is gone. Today, someone can be paranoid, delusional, and dangerous but still walk free if they can say where they're going to sleep. California went from 37,000 patients in state psychiatric hospitals to fewer than 1,500 on involuntary conservatorships. Where did the patients go? The streets. The jails. Family homes where they became ticking time bombs.
The Reiners reportedly spent vast sums on treatment. None of it mattered. The system finally has authority to hold their son—but it took two bodies to get him there.
#NickReiner #RobReiner #MicheleReiner #LPSConservatorship #TrueCrimeToday #StevenBaer #Deinstitutionalization #CaliforniaLaw #MentalHealthLaw #SystemFailure
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the big breakdown. |
| 0:02.2 | A long look back at some of the biggest stories we're covering for you at the Hidden Killers podcast and True Crime Today. |
| 0:09.2 | This is Hidden Killers with Tony Bruske. |
| 0:12.3 | Here now, Tony Bruske. |
| 0:16.4 | This is a story I've been wanting to do for a long time. |
| 0:20.6 | In fact, I actually want to do a documentary on this at some point. |
| 0:24.3 | So this is going to be an interesting one. |
| 0:27.1 | You know what they say, or we think sometimes that things always improve with time. |
| 0:32.5 | We get better at what we do, especially in our institutions, that, you know, a hospital in 1967 is going to be |
| 0:39.6 | better than it was, uh, better than it was in 1967 today. You know, it's, it's improved. |
| 0:46.4 | New technology, new ways of doing things. And in many ways, those things can be true. But in some ways, not at all. |
| 0:58.1 | In some ways, some ideas need to come back. |
| 1:03.3 | They can certainly be improved. |
| 1:05.7 | But there's certain ideas, certain systems that we've had in our past that we simply threw our hands up in the air and said, |
| 1:12.5 | we're not going to do this anymore. Throw the baby out with the bathwater. |
| 1:19.2 | And rather than improving those systems and updating them to more ethical standards, to put it lightly, |
| 1:27.0 | we just said, screw it. |
| 1:30.2 | And in doing so, |
| 1:33.2 | basically took the problem out of our hands, |
| 1:39.4 | meaning the functioning members of society, |
| 1:42.4 | and have said to those who are not so functioning in society, good |
| 1:47.1 | luck. There's a bridge down the road that provides some shelter. And there's a port-a-potty down |
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