Neighbor Stopped Stabbing Attack on TV Minister

A neighbor and longtime friend of television minister George Vandeman pulled Vandeman’s son away Thursday as the son was stabbing his father.

“Thirty seconds later, it would have been too late, I’m pretty sure,” said the friend, Harold Reiner, who lives half a block from Vandeman’s Thousand Oaks home.

Reiner said he was driving past the residence when he saw Ronald Vandeman, 43, stabbing his father in the front yard.

“I stopped my car but, by the time I got there, Ron was on top of George,” Reiner recalled. “Ron is a big fella. I yelled at him; then I took him by the shoulder and kind of pulled him back. He just froze.

Friendship Cited

“I suppose that because of my relationship with Ron . . . I don’t think he would have backed off for anyone else.”

Reiner said Vandeman’s wife, Nellie, arrived home shortly after the attack and telephoned for an ambulance.

Vandeman, 68, host of the long-running Sunday television program “It Is Written,” was released Friday morning from Los Robles Regional Medical Center in Thousand Oaks after being treated for two stab wounds. His son remained in custody on suspicion of attempted murder.

“The knife just missed the heart and spinal column by fractions of an inch,” Reiner said. “He was quite lucky.”

Reiner also serves as a minister for the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which sponsors the evangelist’s broadcasts and helped produce the show for nine years.

Derek Mustow, public relations director for the Seventh-day Adventist Media Center in Newbury Park, where the show is produced, called Reiner’s action “providential.”

Both men said Ronald Vandeman had a long history of mental illness and had been in and out of institutions for 20 years. They said that his mental condition had been kept in balance recently by medication but that a physician took him off the drugs after he suffered an attack of hepatitis three weeks ago.

“It would appear that the withdrawal caused destabilization, which led to the attack,” Mustow said. “That’s the family’s opinion. He has no history of violence that I’m aware of.”

Church officials said the broadcast would not be interrupted because of Vandeman’s injury because the minister recently taped a number of shows that will run for several weeks.