NEED TO KNOW
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Decades before Rob Reiner went public with his son’s struggles with addiction, his All In the Family costar Carroll O’Connor opened up about his son’s struggles with addiction
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In March 1995, O’Connor’s son Hugh died by suicide
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O’Connor would go on to become a vocal anti-drug advocate, successfully championing legislation that allowed families to sue drug dealers for damages in cases like his son’s
Decades before Rob Reiner went public with his son’s struggles with addiction, his All In the Family costar Carroll O’Connor spoke about his own son’s problem with drugs — a struggle that ended in tragedy when his son died by suicide.
O’Connor played Archie Bunker (Reiner’s character’s father-in-law) on All In the Family — a role that earned him four Emmy awards. Later, he would star in the series, In the Heat of the Night, in which his own adopted son, Hugh, portrayed Officer Lonnie Jamison.
Hugh was O’Connor and his wife Nancy’s only child, and was adopted in Rome, while O’Connor was filming the 1963 movie Cleopatra.
Hugh, O’Connor would later share, had fought a drug habit for half his life and was depressed.
And on March 28, 1995, O’Connor received a devastating phone call, in which Hugh, then 32, said he planned to shoot himself.
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As an April 1995 PEOPLE story detailed, O’Connor called police, who sent a SWAT team and a crisis negotiator to Hugh’s home in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles. But by the time they arrived, Hugh was dead.
“One shot in the head,” O’Connor would tell reporters. “Sitting on the sofa.”
Hugh’s suicide came on the third anniversary of his wedding to wardrobe assistant Angela Clayton. The two had a two-year-old son (who, as PEOPLE reported at the time, had been living with O’Connor and his wife at the time) and a troubled marriage.
But it was the drugs, O’Connor would say, that were to blame for his son’s death.
“He had that monkey on his back, and he couldn’t get rid of it,” O’Connor told reporters. Hugh had high levels of cocaine in his system at the time of his death.
As his parents would later tell PEOPLE, Hugh’s drug addiction began after he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease and underwent surgery to remove a malignant lump in his neck at age 16. He turned to marijuana to relieve the nausea from the radiation, they said, and then transitioned to drinking and taking quaaludes before experimenting with cocaine, amphetamines and various prescription drugs.
O’Connor said Hugh had been to three rehab centers over the years, but the efforts to get him off drugs were unsuccessful.
Following his suicide, O’Connor became a vocal anti-drug advocate, successfully campaigning for legislation that would allow families to sue drug dealers for damages in cases like his son’s.
In 1997, California passed legislation that now allows families to recover costs for medical treatment and rehabilitation — with similar laws being enacted in states including Florida, Illinois, Hawaii, and Michigan.
Courtesy Everett Collection
Hugh O’Connor, Carroll O’Connor
Hugh’s drug dealer — a man named Harry Thomas Perzigian – was ultimately arrested and convicted in a Santa Monica court of possessing and furnishing cocaine to Hugh. He was sentenced to a year in jail.
As O’Connor told reporters, “Hugh was an addict, probably without hope. Harry kept feeding him this stuff. We feel this guy indirectly was the cause of our loss.”
Following his conviction and release from jail, Perzigian would sue O’Connor for slander, though a jury unanimously found that O’Connor had not defamed Perzigian in July 1997.
Speaking to PEOPLE in 1996, O’Connor said of his late son: “I think of Hugh every day, but I don’t think of him sadly every day. Most of my thoughts of him are very joyful. But then there are the times — thank God, not too many — when something makes me very sad. Nancy will look at me and say, ‘You look bad. Well, I was having a bad time an hour ago too.’ And we put our arms around each other and say, ‘It’ll be alright soon.'”
Rob Reiner and his wife were also candid over the years about navigating their son Nick Reiner‘s struggles with addiction. Now, Nick is accused of killing the couple after the director and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, were found dead by suspected homicide in their Brentwood, Calif., home on Dec. 14.
CBS via Getty
Carroll O’Connor, Rob Reiner, Sally Struthers, All in the Family
Shortly after their deaths, a source told PEOPLE that Rob and Michele “could never reach stability” with Nick, who had previously been open about his years-long struggles with drug addiction and homelessness and cycled in and out of rehab around 18 times.
Read the original article on People
