Nurse In LA Crash Has Caribbean Roots

By NAN Staff Writer

NEWS AMERICAS, NEW YORK, NY, Sept. 1, 2022: Nicole Lorraine Linton, 37, a travelling ICU nurse who is accused of killing six people after running a red light while speeding in Windsor Hills, California on August 4th, has roots in the Caribbean.

She now faces a new bail hearing on September 12th, after a judge yesterday delayed it to give prosecutors more time to investigate her ‘mental health episodes.

Her attorneys claim she suffered a mental health emergency at the time of the crash, after years of dealing with mental health issues.

District Attorney George Gascon announcing in a press conference that Nicole Lorraine Linton, a nurse from Houston, will be charged with six counts of murder for the Windsor Hills crash Monday afternoon, Aug. 8, 2022. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Linton, 37, who was born to Jamaican immigrant parents and grew up in Mount Vernon, New York, sped into the intersection of La Brea and Slauson in LA around 1:40 p.m. at 90 MPH on Aug. 4th, and caused a fiery chain-reaction crash that killed six people – five adults, including a pregnant woman and an unborn child.

Dead are 23-year-old Asherey Ryan of Los Angeles, who relatives said was 8 1/2 months pregnant. Her unborn child, Armani Lester, also died in the crash and is considered a victim, along with Ryan’s 11-month-old son Alonzo Quintero and 24- year-old boyfriend, Reynold Lester of Los Angeles. They were all in one car, traveling to a pre-natal doctor’s appointment for Ryan, relatives said.

Linton, has been charged with a total of six counts of murder, including the pregnant woman’s unborn child. She is also facing five manslaughter counts of vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence. She could face up to 90 years to life in state prison if convicted as charged.

Nurse Nicole Linton as seen on LinkedIn.

The traveling nurse from Houston, Texas, who was working at Kaiser Permanente West Los Angeles Medical Center, CA,  may have experienced an “apparent lapse of consciousness” during a mental health crisis in the moments before the crash, the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday.

The paper cited information in a filing by Linton’s attorneys that detail her four-year struggle with bipolar disorder and a determination by a doctor who treated her following the crash that “she has no recollection of the events that led to her collision.”

Linton was hospitalized after the crash but survived and has been jailed without bail since. One of her attorneys, Halim Dhanidina, told a judge on Aug. 8th that he didn’t believe there was anything to justify treating Linton’s case equivalent to a capital murder case. He said she could reasonably post $300,000 bail.

Linton is set to be arraigned Oct. 26.

Linton is licensed in California, Texas and Hawaii. According to the Daily Mail, her life unraveled after Germaine Mason, the Jamaican-born, British Olympic silver medalist she had planned to marry, was killed in a 2017 motorcycle crash.

Prior to becoming a nurse, she reportedly worked for several years as a cocktail waitress in a series of New York City strip clubs including the infamous Sin City and Club Eleven in the Bronx.

Linton went to Howard University where she got a BA in Marketing in 2007 and made the Dean’s List. She also worked as a sales manager for General Motors in New York’s Westchester County supplying franchises with vehicles but lost that job due to company restructuring in 2009. In 2010 Linton began working as an ‘extern’ at NYU but did not complete her nursing degree until 2015.

DailyMail.com cited another source as saying that that after her parents returned to Jamaica, Linton went to North Carolina to live with her sister. She then moved to Texas. According to her LinkedIn page she graduated from the University of Texas Health Center in Houston with a Registered Nursing/Registered Nurse Bachelor’s Degree and a Doctor of Nursing Practice, Nurse Anesthetist.

She worked first in Laredo then at various hospitals in Houston. She then became a traveling ICU registered nurse in 2020, licensed to work in California, Texas and Hawaii.

She was in Los Angeles working as a contractor at the Kaiser Permanente West Los Angeles Hospital under the umbrella of nursing contracting group AMN Healthcare, whom she joined in 2020.