A former registered nurse was convicted on Friday of six counts of murder, including the death of an unborn child, after she drove through a Los Angeles intersection at 130 miles per hour in 2022, prosecutors said.
A jury found the nurse, Nicole Linton, 41, guilty of second-degree murder after she “deliberately put her foot on the gas” and accelerated through a traffic light that had been red for 15 seconds and into an intersection with visible traffic, Nathan J. Hochman, the county district attorney, said in a statement on Friday.
On Aug. 4, 2022, Ms. Linton was working as a registered nurse when she left her shift at West Los Angeles Medical Center, a Kaiser Permanente facility, according to the statement.
Around 1:40 p.m., she drove her Mercedes-Benz through a red light like a “high-speed missile,” the district attorney said. She did not swerve and struck multiple vehicles, three of which caught fire.
In one vehicle was Asherey Ryan, 23, who was more than eight months pregnant, her boyfriend, Reynold Lester, 24, and their 11-month-old son, Alonzo Quintero.
They were driving to Ms. Ryan’s final prenatal appointment when Ms. Linton’s vehicle struck theirs, the force of which “sliced their car in half,” according to the statement.
Everyone in the vehicle died, including the unborn child, as did two people in a separate vehicle, Nathesia Lewis, 43, and Lynette Noble, 38.
In the weeks before the crash, Ms. Linton’s mental health had deteriorated, according to court records from a civil suit filed by Ms. Ryan’s mother.
The records said that Ms. Linton had a history of motor vehicle crashes, arrests, manic episodes and involuntary commitments to psychiatric hospitals.
At the criminal trial, prosecutors argued that Ms. Linton had not sought help for her mental health issues, The Los Angeles Times reported. Prosecutors said that she had been diagnosed as bipolar and was involved in several violent episodes when she was not on her medication.
Those episodes included an instance when Ms. Linton drove through red lights at 100 m.p.h., The Times reported. Prosecutors said that Ms. Linton had not taken her medication and had not slept for days leading up to the deadly crash in 2022.
Ms. Linton’s defense lawyer said that she had suffered a seizure just before the wreck, The Times reported. But prosecutors argued that Ms. Linton had no history of seizures, and a medical test to induce a seizure after the crash found no brain abnormalities.
A lawyer for Ms. Linton could not immediately be reached for comment on Saturday. The district attorney’s office could not be reached for further details.
Ms. Linton’s nursing license was suspended on Aug. 15, 2022, by a court order, according to state records.
She is scheduled to be sentenced on Dec. 1 and is expected to face “multiple life sentences,” the district attorney’s statement said.
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