The news was impossible to ignore.
Two people were found dead in their home after a relative contacted police. The loss was profound, the victims beloved in their community. The crime was brutal — and felt all the more so when investigators focused their attention on the couple’s son, who had a documented history of mental illness.
I know what you’re thinking. How could this happen? What went wrong? Why couldn’t something be done to get help and prevent this?
The loss of Rob Reiner and his wife, Michelle, is a tragedy.
It is. You are right to ask those questions. But this is not the Reiners’ story.
This is about William and Georgeann Opdenhoff — and it happened in 2002.
They were both respected educators. William was the retired superintendent of the State College Area School District and continued consulting to help other school boards shape curriculum and policy. Georgeann was a special-education teacher.
There were few people better equipped to understand the challenges their son, Daniel, faced with paranoid schizophrenia. That is why it was so shocking when the couple was killed by the son they loved.
The only mystery in the aftermath was where Daniel had gone. He fled to New York City and was found within days.
Everything about Daniel’s journey through the court system reflected his mental illness. During his preliminary hearing, a recording of his interview with police in New York was played in court.
Daniel explained that it was not his parents he believed he had killed but droids sent to take their place. It was heartbreaking to hear him tell officers that everything would make sense once he spoke to his father — something that could never happen again.
In the 23 years since, mental health has entered public conversations with maddening regularity — usually only after catastrophe. Raised loudly and aggressively in the wake of violence, it becomes less a call to care than a vehicle for blame, deepening stigma and discouraging people from seeking help.
Mental health must be treated as health. It is as physical as it is psychological. The National Institutes of Health notes that schizophrenia is associated with shortened life expectancy, serious medical complications and elevated suicide risk. Worldwide, it remains a leading cause of disability — despite being widely underdiagnosed.
NBC News has reported that Nick Reiner had been diagnosed with schizophrenia years ago. Daniel Opdenhoff was 24 when he killed his parents. He was not new to his diagnosis either.
The intensely individual nature of mental-health treatment means there is no blanket cure. Care requires trial and error, adjustment and calibration over time, making continuity essential. Yet it is often easier to blame patients for lapses in medication than to acknowledge barriers such as unstable insurance coverage and provider shortages.
The Health Resources and Services Administration estimates that more than 150 million Americans live in areas with insufficient access to mental-health care. In many places, “insufficient” means none at all. Those shortages have only grown in the decades since the Opdenhoffs died.
In 2004, Daniel pleaded guilty. Prosecutors accepted a plea deal intended to protect public safety and ensure he received psychiatric treatment. He remains incarcerated at SCI Waymart, a state prison that houses people with serious mental-health needs, where he may remain for decades.
By then, we should not still be relying on prisons to deliver the psychiatric care people need long before violence enters the picture.