When Nicole Linton’s Mercedes-Benz flew through a red light and barreled into a busy South L.A. intersection, causing an explosion on contact, the streaking luxury car looked like a missile, according to video displayed in court Tuesday morning.
As the wreckage of the three-car crash burned, video from the scene on Aug. 4, 2022, captured apocalyptic images. Thick black smoke filled the sky. Blood streaked the asphalt among littered car parts. An infant’s car seat lay overturned in the intersection, the 1-year-old child who had been riding in it ejected into a nearby parking lot, where horrified bystanders rushed to help and cradled the baby’s broken neck, prosecutors said.
As a camera pans through the destruction, it stops on one long blood smear: the remains of an unborn baby whom prosecutors say was “ripped” from her mother’s womb in the crash.
The nightmare imagery was the result of Linton’s decision to press her gas pedal to the floor and reach speeds of 131 mph, prosecutors allege, plowing into the intersection of Slauson and La Brea avenues.
Linton’s trial on six counts of murder began Tuesday, with many of the victims’ relatives seated in the courtroom as prosecutors displayed gruesome images of their loved ones’ last moments. One by one, they left in tears, racing for the door.
“The defendant had plenty of time to stop, to brake, to swerve,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Brittany Vannoy said. “But instead she floored that gas pedal to 131 mph, ignored that red light, and barreled toward that intersection, killing six people.”
The wreck claimed the lives of Nathesia Lewis, 42, Lynette Noble, 38, Asherey Ryan, 23, her 11-month-old son, Alonzo, and her boyfriend, Reynold Lester, 23. Ryan was more than eight months pregnant at the time, and Linton is also charged with killing her unborn child. Vannoy said Ryan was on her way to her final prenatal appointment when the fatal crash occurred.
Linton’s defense attorney, Jovan Blacknell, said Linton had a seizure moments before the collision and lost control of the vehicle. What prosecutors termed as a “conscious disregard for human life,” he described as a medical emergency.
Linton miraculously walked away with only superficial injuries. Paramedics who treated her after the crash testified during a 2024 preliminary hearing that she appeared confused and could not remember the moments leading up to the deadly wreck.
“She asked, ‘Did I kill people? Did I hurt people?’ And then she started to, I would say, freak out,” emergency medical technician Isabel Schrama previously testified.
Linton had struggled with bipolar disorder for years before the crash and was twice hospitalized due to issues related to her mental illness. She had been prescribed lithium and lorazepam but said she had not taken medication for years, according to a UCLA psychiatrist who testified at the preliminary hearing. Blacknell is not seeking an insanity defense.
Although Blacknell has said his client had a seizure, a doctor who attended to Linton immediately after the wreck previously testified there was no evidence of a neurological episode. Vannoy also said accident reconstruction evidence shows Linton’s car stayed centered in a curving lane as it approached the intersection where the crash happened, suggesting she was using the steering wheel and in some control of the car.
Both Blacknell and Vannoy focused on the minutes leading up to the crash, offering different explanations for Linton’s actions.
The prosecutor said Linton, a traveling nurse, was disillusioned with her job, angry with co-workers and planning to quit her post at Kaiser Permanente in West L.A. That rage came with her behind the wheel, Vannoy said.
“She got in her car and channeled that fury, that frustration, into her driving,” Vannoy said.
She also displayed a 2020 blog post that Linton purportedly wrote, titled “Bitter F—ing Nurse,” in which she expressed long-held frustrations with her life and career and admitted she at times lied to avoid “dealing with the consequences of my actions.”
Vannoy pointed to that missive while arguing that Linton fabricated the seizure claims. Blacknell noted the blog was written while Linton lived in North Carolina and had nothing to do with the crash.
Blacknell, however, said phone calls between Linton and her sister and testimony from co-workers will show the nurse was “not herself” the entire day leading up the crash.
Blacknell said Linton called her sister and talked about possibly marrying the actor Will Smith and picking up her niece for school in the moments before the wreck.
Linton’s older sister lives in Philadelphia and her niece attends college in Hawaii, so that would have been impossible, Blacknell said. Ultimately, he said, the wreck was a tragedy but not a crime.
“The greatest challenge is the emotion of it all,” he said when asking the jury to focus on the law and not the horrible crime scene images. “It is natural to be sympathetic to people who were unsuspectingly killed while innocently driving.”
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