It has been discovered that the ICU nurse who ran a red light at 90 mph and killed six people in a horrifying fire wreck in Los Angeles earlier this month also had a “frightening” mental breakdown in the days before the tragedy.
Nicole Linton, a 37-year-old LA nurse, is presently accused of murder. According to a filing by the nurse’s defense counsel, their client had a “apparent loss of consciousness” at the time of the collision.
The file, which The LA Times was able to get, provides a thorough account of the suspect’s deteriorating mental condition leading up to the event, which resulted in the deaths of a pregnant woman, her unborn child, her one-year-old son, as well as four other people.
Texas native Linton is presently in detention on six murder counts related to the five people and the unborn child.
She is being detained without bail because prosecutors think she poses a flight risk and a threat to the public.
The lawsuit portrays a picture of a mentally ill lady who has quickly lost her sanity over the previous four years and claims that Linton has “no recall of the circumstances that led to her accident.”
Linton’s lawyers assert in the statement that their client was given a bipolar illness diagnosis in 2018, and they attribute the suspect’s worsening mental condition to her reluctance to take her prescribed medicine during the epidemic after an internet therapist informed her she just had anxiety.
The day of the August 4 collision, they said, would see her health deteriorate to a “frightening” stage, during which she Facetimed her sister while fully clothed only hours before committing the murder.
Nicole L. Linton, 37, (pictured in court) has been charged with six counts of murder and five counts of vehicular manslaughter
Here is a picture of the wreckage of the Mercedes that Linton was speeding in at the time of the collision.
According to Linton’s attorneys, her family learned of her mental health concerns for the first time in May 2018 when she was working as a nursing student at the University of Texas in her hometown of Houston.
In a letter to the court that was submitted with the application, her sister Camille Linton stated that this was the time when her sister had her first mental breakdown while pursuing a career as a nurse anesthetist.
According to Camille Linton, “the tension was too much for her and it “broke” her.” This marked the start of Nicole’s four-year battle with mental illness.
Linton’s sister claims that during the breakdown, which happened in 2018, the suspect reportedly had a panic attack and fled her flat.
According to the complaint, when police approached her, Linton got into one of the officers’ service cars. She was then detained for disorderly behavior.
The collision sent a line of vehicles speeding toward another petrol station over the road until they came to a halt just in front of the pumps.
After that, lawyers described how Linton would phone her family from the police station, but instead of being concerned about her predicament, she despicably told them she was worried about the welfare of her pet turtle.
After being released from jail a short time later, Linton said she had been possessed by her deceased grandma and got in touch with her family once again to voice her concern.
According to the extensively redacted records, Linton required stitches for a head cut she sustained after hitting her head on a glass partition while raving against the police and the Supreme Court. She was then sent to Ben Taub mental hospital the next day.
According to the attorneys, Linton performed Bob Marley songs and showed signs of instability while receiving treatment.
According to the defense motion, Linton received her bipolar diagnosis at that time and was given mental medication, which she took for the next year.
Tabia Johnson, a witness to the crash, took a photo of the suspect, Nicole L. Linton (center), commenting that Linton only appeared to suffer minor injuries in the horrible crash
Linton can be seen here after the crash with blood on her left thigh and left forearm, she appears to be wearing hospital scrubs
Linton, who is shown here seated with a bloodied arm, is being directed by an emergency medical personnel.
Linton was forced sent to another psychiatric facility more than a year later, this time after a neighbor saw her running around her apartment complex in her underwear, the lawyers said. This time, Linton was not choosing to be there.
The complaint claims that when Linton stopped taking her prescription bipolar medication in the early stages of the epidemic, her mental health quickly deteriorated worse.
The rationale for this judgment, according to the attorneys, was that Linton had been informed exclusively by an online therapist she had been communicating with remotely throughout COVID limitations that she was merely experiencing anxiety.
Early in 2020 and into 2022, Linton’s conduct allegedly became “increasingly terrifying,” to the point that she started to act irrationally deluded and wary of both her family and workplace.
Linton, whose health reportedly declined while she worked at the West Los Angeles Medical Center, is believed to have started to lose sleep and have an unreasonable obsession with cleanliness during this period, according to the petition.
Other bizarre occurrences included Linton going off on irrational rants and accusing her family of stealing from her, according to her attorneys.
In the Los Angeles neighborhood of Windsor Hills, Linton’s Mercedes sped past a petrol station before crashing into the side of a traffic bottleneck.
The petition discloses that this activity continued unchecked until the days leading up to the August 4 disaster, when it became more worrisome.
According to her lawyers, Nicole’s conduct “grew more scary in the days and hours preceding up to the events of August 4”.
They said that Linton was in touch with her sister Camille throughout this period and had constantly emphasized to her that her hospital colleagues were “acting odd.”
The court documents additionally state that Linton drove home from the hospital for lunch on the day of the collision and FaceTimed her sister.
However, the call itself raised suspicions since Linton conducted it while entirely bare, which significantly alarmed her brother, who stated the behavior was unusual.
Before leaving for work once again at 1:24 p.m., only minutes before the collision, Linton contacted her sister once more to let her know she was going.
According to the statement, she informed her sister she was flying out to meet her in Houston the next day so she could fix her niece’s hair, which is why she made her hurried leave.
According to the attorneys, Linton inexplicably said during the phone that she was getting married and that her sister “should meet her at the chapel.”
When Linton arrived to the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center on August 6, two days after the accident, a doctor who examined her noted that she had “no recall of the circumstances that led to her collision.”
She remembered seeing her vehicle on fire as she lay on the pavement after that, he wrote.
According to the lawsuit, the doctor would subsequently determine that Linton had bipolar illness and had a “apparent loss of awareness” at the time of the accident.