A Los Angeles County jury convicted a former travel nurse of murder on Friday, finding that she intentionally accelerated to roughly 130 mph before slamming into two other vehicles at a Windsor Hills intersection in 2022, killing six people — among them a pregnant woman, her 11-month-old son, and her unborn child.
Nicole Linton, 39, was driving a Mercedes-Benz through the intersection of La Brea Avenue and Slauson Avenue on August 4, 2022, when she ran a red light at high speed and struck two cars, according to the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office. The impact set one of the vehicles on fire. Linton was working as a traveling nurse at the time of the crash.
Who died
Asherey Ryan, 23, was eight and a half months pregnant and driving to a prenatal appointment when the crash killed her, along with her boyfriend, 24-year-old Reynold Lester, and their 11-month-old son, Alonzo. Ryan's unborn child, posthumously named Armani, also died. Two women in a second car, 43-year-old Nathesia Lewis and 38-year-old Lynette Noble, were killed as well. The jury convicted Linton of six counts of second-degree murder, one for each victim.
Prosecutors had originally charged Linton with those six murder counts plus five counts of vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence, filed as an alternative set of charges covering five of the six victims. With Friday's murder convictions covering all six deaths, the lesser manslaughter counts are no longer the operative charges in the case.
A seizure, or a deliberate choice to speed up?
Linton's defense argued throughout the trial, which began September 8, 2026, that she suffered a seizure or another sudden medical event behind the wheel and had no control over the car in the seconds before the crash. Prosecutors argued the opposite — that the evidence showed Linton accelerating into the intersection rather than losing consciousness. Linton declined to testify in her own defense. The jury deliberated for roughly three hours before returning guilty verdicts on all six counts.
I've pulled back-to-back travel contracts where exhaustion catches up with you on the drive home, and fatigue behind the wheel after a bad shift is a real, documented hazard of this work. But this jury heard the same medical-emergency defense that gets raised in cases like this one, weighed it against the evidence for three weeks, and rejected it in about three hours. The lesson here isn't really about seizures. It's that six people — including a baby who hadn't even been born yet — are dead, and no license, job title, or medical explanation changes what 130 mph through a red light means for the people in the other car.
What's next
Linton is scheduled to be sentenced December 1, 2026, and faces the possibility of life in prison on the murder counts. The case was originally filed under former District Attorney George Gascón and tried under his successor, Nathan Hochman, who took office in December 2024. Linton has not worked as a nurse since the crash. Her trial drew national attention both for the scale of the loss and because the medical defense her attorneys offered was ultimately rejected by a jury that heard it in full.