It was the kind of video that stops you cold. The kind you watch over and over, searching for something that doesn’t add up, because the human mind struggles to process the sheer violence unfolding in a few seconds of footage. And for days, that is exactly what one family did.
They watched the crash spread across social media, shared by strangers in horror, not knowing that the six people obliterated in the fireball were their own blood. “Had to watch that accident so many times on the internet not even knowing it was our own family,” a grieving relative said. “We prayed for that family.
We prayed for the victims not even knowing it was our own family. I don’t know if I can continue school or work. I can’t stop thinking about it.
I can’t sleep.”
This is the story they were forced to watch unfold from a distance. A former Houston nurse, Nicole Linton, is accused of killing six people in a fiery crash near Los Angeles. She is being held without bail.
Authorities say she had no drugs in her system, but the California Highway Patrol reports show she had at least 13 previous crashes, including one incident in 2020 that totaled two cars. As the case moves through the courts, new information is emerging that paints a complicated, devastating picture of what happened on that sunny afternoon.
Five seconds. That is all it took. Five seconds between a car sitting perfectly still at a red light and that same car exploding through a Los Angeles intersection at 130 miles an hour.
One moment it is an ordinary Thursday afternoon. The next there is fire, twisted metal, and smoke rising high enough to see from miles away. When it was over, six people were dead.
Among them, a young mother 8 and a half months pregnant, her baby boy not even a year old, and the child she was carrying who never got the chance to be born. And the woman behind the wheel walked away from the wreckage alive. She was a nurse.
Someone whose entire job was saving lives. Today, she is on trial for murder.
Four years have now passed since the tragic afternoon, and the trial is finally underway. The case involves the death of six people at a Windsor Hills intersection, a group now referred to as the Slosson Six. They died on August 4th, 2022, in a neighborhood called Windsor Hills in Southwest Los Angeles, right where La Brea Avenue meets Slauson.
It was a little before 1:40 in the afternoon. Traffic was light. The weather was typical and clear.
Nobody at that intersection had any reason to think this day would be different from a thousand others.
In one of the cars was Ashli Ryan. She was 23 years old and about to have her second baby any day now. In fact, she had a prenatal appointment scheduled for that exact afternoon.
Besides her was her fiance, Reynold. Buckled into the back seat was their 11-month-old son, Alonzo, who was just weeks away from his first birthday. The three of them were on their way to that prenatal checkup.
They had already chosen the name for the little one that she was carrying. They were going to call him Armani. A few feet away, in a different car, were two friends, Nathesia and Lynette.
They were headed to the mall. That was it. Just running an errand on a normal afternoon.
The kind of errand you don’t think twice about when you’re doing it. They didn’t know each other, but their paths were about to intersect in the most brutal way possible.
And none of them knew the woman who was speeding toward that red light. Her name is Nicole Linton. She was 37 years old, a traveling nurse who took contracts across the country and had landed in Los Angeles for the summer.
On paper, she was exactly the kind of person you’d trust in an emergency room. Trained, ambitious, somebody who spent her career keeping strangers alive in the most critical moments. But there is another side to the story, and it is the part her defense would eventually build its entire case around.
Years earlier, Nicole had a breakdown. She was hospitalized, and doctors diagnosed her with bipolar disorder. When she stayed on her medication, things held together.
When she didn’t, they unraveled.
In the weeks leading up to that August afternoon, the pieces were coming apart in a devastating way. An online therapist had reportedly told her she was only dealing with anxiety, not bipolar disorder at all. So she stopped taking the medication that had been keeping her stable.
She wasn’t sleeping. The people around her would later say something about her felt off. That is the version her lawyers tell.
Prosecutors see something colder. The truth of what was happening inside that car is exactly what a jury is being asked to decide right now.
Here is what isn’t in dispute. Nicole’s Mercedes came down La Brea heading south toward the intersection. The light in front of her was red, and it had been red for several seconds.
Long enough that anyone paying attention would have started slowing down. She didn’t slow down. She did the opposite.
Investigators later pulled the data straight from the car’s own computer, and the numbers are chilling in their simplicity. In the final stretch before the crash, the vehicle was accelerating at 122 mph, then higher, climbing toward 130. The speed limit on that road is 35 miles per hour.
And in those last few seconds, the brake was never touched. Not once. The gas pedal stayed pressed all the way to the floor.
The Mercedes blew through the red light and hit the crossing traffic with the force of a missile. The first impact set off a chain reaction across the whole intersection. Cars were thrown into each other.
One vehicle was torn nearly in half by the force. Almost instantly, flames fed by a gas station right there on the corner engulfed the wreckage. Witnesses said it looked like a bomb had gone off.
Nine vehicles ended up caught in the chaos. Smoke climbed into the sky above us, and six people lost their lives. Inside those cars were the people who would never make it home.
Ashey, her fiance Reynold, their baby boy Alonzo, the unborn son they’d named Armani, and the two women on their way to the mall, Nathesia and Lynette.
One witness, Deborah Jackson, was about to pump gas at the on-site station when the explosion happened. “Actually, at first I thought that they dropped a bomb,” she said. “I realized that it was two cars there.
You could see the people on fire. It was a crash, an explosion. The flames went over my whole car.
I thought my car was on fire.” People were screaming for her to jump out, and she stayed struggling with her seatbelt. “I couldn’t do it.
I was terrified. I saw things flying in the air, metal, so I hid behind the pump.” First responders worked frantically to rescue the injured, but the scene was catastrophic.
A handful of ambulances responded to help eight other people injured in the crash. The LA County Fire Department confirmed two adults and six children survived with minor injuries, a brief glimmer of relief in an ocean of loss.
Investigators told reporters they did rescue the driver of the Mercedes. The woman who drove her car through the red light and caused the gruesome crash survived. She had serious injuries, but she was alive.
At the hospital, a doctor who examined her said she seemed to have no memory of what had just happened at all. And that is where this stopped being just a horrific accident and became something much harder to answer. Prosecutors charged Nicole Linton with six counts of murder.
One for each life lost, including the unborn child. Not manslaughter. Murder.
Their argument came down to a legal idea called implied malice. District Attorney George Gascón held a press conference to announce the charges, stating that Linton would face six counts of murder and five counts of gross vehicular manslaughter. He explained that her vehicle struck an SUV containing a family of seven, and—miraculously—they were only severely injured.
The man described the violence of the impact, and how a vibrant family was destroyed in the blink of an eye.
The defense fought hard against those charges, calling the evidence exaggerated. And to this day, much of it remains disputed. One thing that got ruled out early was the presence of drugs and alcohol.
Toxicology came back clean. Whatever happened inside that car, it wasn’t chemical. So the defense went a completely different direction.
Their claim is that Nicole never made a decision at all, that she suffered a medical event, a seizure, and lost control of her own body in those final seconds. In their telling, this wasn’t a driver choosing to speed. It was a woman who was, at that moment, not truly conscious of anything.
They even point to how she was found, with her arm hanging out the window, as consistent with a seizure. Two stories, one car, and a gap between them that six lives fell into.
In March of 2023, a judge in Los Angeles Superior Court found Linton competent to stand trial. The case officially moved through the courts, with multiple hearings and meetings and legal wrangling over evidence and mental state. By September 2026, the trial finally began in downtown Los Angeles.
Nicole Linton, now 39, appeared in court and pleaded not guilty. The first thing prosecutors did was play the surveillance footage of the crash for the jury, the raw video still and uncompromising. Several members of the victims’ families couldn’t sit through it.
They got up and walked out of the courtroom before it finished. Community activist and friend of the families, Najee Ali, was packed in the courtroom for support. “Both images that I, the family, and everyone who witnessed will never forget,” he said.
“This has been a very hard and difficult time for the family members and everyone in the courtroom. We saw the aftermath of what Nicole Linton caused.”
During her opening statement, the prosecutor argued that Linton had a full 130 feet and 4. 1 seconds to observe the red solid light, according to their accident reconstructionist, and she had ample time to see the light, to brake, to swerve, to avoid getting to that intersection at that time. Instead, the data shows she actually accelerated.
The defense argued back, claiming that this wasn’t intentional but a physical medical event, a medical problem.
Reynald Lester’s mother, Janice, is walking through the painful memory of losing her son and grandson. She told reporters about the last time she spoke to her son, when he called her just moments before the crash. “He called me because they were on the way to the doctor’s office,” she said.
“They were in good spirits. He was happy. And now they are gone.”
The family members of the victims sat through the graphic evidence, grief painted on their faces. One by one, the toll became unbearable. “I have to live with this for the rest of my life,” she said.
“He had the sweetest smile. The most beautiful smile in the world. He didn’t deserve that.”
When the trial resumes, the jury members will be forced to study evidence from mechanical analyses, mental health records, and the testimonies of dozens of witnesses, to retrace the final moments that shred the lives of six people.
The question they have to answer is whether this was a crime or a catastrophe no one could have stopped through. We sat down with Davis, Reyn’s sister Ashli, at her home. “I have never called her Ash,” she says.
It’s always “Raquelle.” Davis says her sister was excited about her second pregnancy. She was saying it was a boy.
“She was on her way to the doctor’s office. The force of the crash caused this child seat to be ejected. It had belonged to my nephew, Alonzo.
He had the most beautiful smile in the world.” That afternoon, the entire couple’s families lost so much. Reynol and Alonzo are dead.
Ashli and her soon-to-be-born son died in the same wreck. They are memorialized in the community by the side of the La Brea intersection.
The driver Nicole Linton remains confined in jail without bail. The trial has hundreds of technical experts on the stand, from crash reconstructionists to neurologists and psychologists. Each of them tells a version of that infinite 5 seconds.
But outside the courtroom, the family left waiting does not care about the loops or intentions. “All I wanted to know is why,” Ashli’s teary sister said. “I just want to know why.
That’s it. My only sister was the only one that could not be identified like everybody else. That’s why we here so late.
Because my sister was ‘it’s the unknown.’ And we do want justice for our sister. I just pray that one day, we get answers.”
Whether Linton loses her case or is found not guilty by reason of insanity, the destruction remains. Six people went out that day expecting to come home. A mother on her way to see a baby, a Nurse who was trained to heal travelers, two friends headed out for an afternoon.
All of them missing.
We’ll keep covering the trial as it unfolds. Do you think this was a criminal responsibility or a mental health crash she couldn’t control? Let me know where you watch from below.
And take care of each other out there. It’s far too easy to lose a life in five seconds.