August 4th, 2022
This is an active case so there is not much I will be able to say about it. It was my other sister, Kim, who was on the video call with Nicole Linton the day of the accident. Kim and Nicole spoke pretty much everyday and she had started to notice that Nicky behaving erratically and saying things that did not make sense. Kim called me 4 minutes before the accident saying she was scared Nicole was having another manic episode. Kim also mentioned to me that Nicole went home for lunch at one point, and it was there, while at home, she briefly walked across the screen naked while changing. I just felt I had to clear that part of it due to the misinformation around why and how she was naked. After lunch, Nicole went back to work and was there for some period in a manic state. At some point, while still manic she left work and the accident happened shortly after that.
It was around 5pm PST when I found out about the accident after speaking with a social worker who told me that Nicole was still in the ER. She said that they brought her in by ambulance and that it was a 4 vehicle accident. She also mentioned that Nicole didn’t initially recall the accident, and that it wasn’t unusual to experience amnesia in an accident. She then told me that she was alert, oriented, speaking, reacting and everything was good. I’ve had the same phone number since freshman year and it was the only number Nicole remembered. So even though we hadn’t spoken in over a year, Nicole asked the social worker to contact me so I could put her in contact with our other sister. She then told me there were other people in the accident that did not survive and she wasn’t sure If they were going to admit her or have her stay in the hospital.
At that moment when I heard some people didn’t survive, it never once crossed my mind that Nicole was the cause. I just thought she was somehow caught up in a pretty bad 4 car pileup. It wasn’t until a family member found the LA times article around 6pm PST that we knew what happened. They then found the youtube video of the crash and we were all in total shock. In one of the articles, they mentioned that the accident happened at 1:40pm PST, and it was after checking my call log from earlier that we realized the accident happened 4 minutes after my sister called me worried about her being manic. That call lasted 5 minutes, which means we were still talking when the accident occurred. So, because of that phone call from earlier, I knew right away that it wasn’t intentional. When claims were being made about her being drunk or having drugs in her system, I was 100% confident that the toxicology report would come back negative, which it did.
When I see that video, I don’t see Nicole driving…I see her mental illness driving. Something must’ve happened that caused her to completely disassociate with reality, from the fact that there was no reaction from her to break or swerve. Was it something similar to what happened in May 2018, when she became completely catatonic at the police station? Could she really have a neurological condition like frontal lobe epilepsy that could’ve cause her to go stiff and have amnesia? These are questions we would like to have answered and why we want to get her into a treatment facility to be fully tested and properly diagnosed.
That night, we I kept calling the hospital requesting that they complete a psychiatric evaluation on her. I was told that would be done but I’m not sure if they ever did.
I would also like to quickly address claims of her having a history of reckless driving. Within hours of the charges being announced, allegations were made by the media that she was involved in 13 car accidents. These allegations were attributed to a declaration from a California Highway Patrol officer who claimed that she had 13 prior reportable incidents on her insurance record. This was extremely misleading because it was presented as if she was involved in 13 collisions when a reportable incident could be something as small as calling a tow truck to change a flat tire or jumpstart a battery. They are also now referencing really old speeding tickets she got over 10 years ago while driving on a freeway.
And as far as we are aware, she has never been in any collisions involving high speed, reckless driving, resulting in serious injuries, or involving any manic episodes.
To me, the only thing that could explain the accident on August 4 is something like a psychotic break or a seizure where the body freezes up, where you still have a certain degree of awareness. All of the evidence submitted to this point, including information from the data recorder in Nicole’s car, is consistent with the possibility that the accident was caused by a neurological or psychiatric disorder. We will be working tirelessly to explore these possibilities as they are the only logical explanation for what happened.
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