Verdict
The Jury Said Murder. The Medical Examiner Said Undetermined. Here's How Prosecutors Won Anyway.
On June 22, 2026, a Snohomish County jury found Nestor Hernandez Melgar guilty of first-degree murder in the death of his girlfriend, Lindsay Geary. Guilty, also, of first-degree burglary. Guilty of violating a domestic violence no-contact order. All three counts carried a domestic violence special aggravator.
What makes this verdict unusual — and legally significant — is what the Snohomish County Medical Examiner’s Office did not do.
Seven months after Lindsay Geary was found dead on the bathroom floor of her Everett apartment, the medical examiner issued a finding on the manner of her death. The finding was not “homicide.” It was not “suicide.” It was “undetermined.”
A jury convicted Nestor Hernandez Melgar of first-degree murder without a single forensic official declaring that a murder had occurred. No defendant DNA was found on Geary’s neck. No murder weapon was definitively established in the forensic record. The case that Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Toni Montgomery brought before jurors was built almost entirely from behavioral evidence — the order of phone calls made, the length of a rope, and 90 seconds spent not opening a door.
How did prosecutors win? That is what this post explains. Sentencing is scheduled for July 22, 2026.
Who Was Lindsay Geary
Lindsay Geary was 37 years old when she died on November 16, 2024. She grew up in Everett, Washington, graduated from Everett High School, and spent her professional life as a bookkeeper — most recently at the Silver Firs Safeway location in Everett, where she had also worked in earlier positions at other area Safeway stores.
By every account from the people who knew her, Geary was defined by how she showed up for others. Coworkers described her as “the most beautiful kind and sweetest person.” She trained colleagues, advocated for them in difficult situations, and — in a detail her colleagues remembered specifically — kept extra blankets in her truck to give to homeless customers.
She is survived by her mother Darcy Geary; her father Ken Geary and stepmother Cindy; her sister Kelly Green and brother-in-law Mike; stepsister Claire Armstrong and husband Daniel; nephews Hunter Green, Hyde Armstrong, Jack Armstrong, and Jude Armstrong; and nieces Ivy Green and Stella Armstrong. Those who knew her described her as passionate about animals and devoted to her family.
Her relationship with Nestor Hernandez Melgar, then 27 or 28 years old, was serious enough that the two shared her Madison Street apartment — even after a domestic violence no-contact order had been issued against him. That order, issued approximately two months before her death, would become one of the most consequential facts in the case against him.
The Night of November 16, 2024
What is known about the night of November 16, 2024 begins with what Hernandez Melgar told authorities: he called 911 to report that his girlfriend had hanged herself.
What arrived at her apartment on Madison Street were patrol officers responding to that call. What they found was Geary on the bathroom floor, deceased. A rope was nearby. According to court records, the cause of death was asphyxia due to ligature compression.
The sequence of events before that 911 call became central to the prosecution’s theory of the case. According to prosecutors, Hernandez Melgar did not call 911 first. He called Geary’s mother. He called his own mother. Only then did he call emergency services. Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Toni Montgomery argued the implications of that sequence directly to the jury: “The intention was never to summon law enforcement, it was never to bring cops to look at the house. The scene only had to look as good as it needed to to fool family, which is why mom was called, not the authorities, not police or paramedics.”
When officers arrived, according to court records, Hernandez Melgar took more than a minute and thirty seconds to open the apartment door.
His presence at the apartment that night was itself a criminal act. A domestic violence no-contact order against him had been active since approximately September 2024. Despite that order, according to testimony, the couple had continued to see each other and Hernandez Melgar had allegedly continued residing at the apartment. Eight days before Geary’s death, Everett police were called to the residence after Hernandez Melgar allegedly attempted to break in.
When officers discovered the active no-contact order that night, Hernandez Melgar was arrested at the scene.
The Defense: The Suicide Theory
The defense put forward by attorneys Catherine Bentley and Allison Hunter of the Snohomish County Public Defender’s Office was direct: Lindsay Geary died by suicide, and Nestor Hernandez Melgar was, in Bentley’s words, “wrongfully accused.”
Their argument rested on several pillars.
First, the defense presented text messages Geary had sent approximately seven weeks before her death. In opening arguments, Bentley quoted one directly: “I keep having thoughts of hanging, I’m feeling very depressed.” The defense also introduced phone data showing multiple internet searches related to methods of self-harm made from Geary’s phone on the night of November 16, 2024.
Second, defense attorneys pointed to a draft text message found on Geary’s phone. The message, written from the day of her death, described a dream in which she “fantasized about the relief of death.” Defense attorney Hunter emphasized a critical detail about this evidence: investigators did not discover the draft until December 27, 2025 — more than a year after Geary’s death. The defense characterized it as a possible suicide note that investigators had failed to find in a timely manner.
Third, and most significantly from a forensic standpoint, defense attorneys argued that the physical evidence excluded Hernandez Melgar from the act of killing. “When Lindsay’s body was processed, Nestor’s DNA was not found on any part of Lindsay’s neck,” Bentley stated in opening arguments. “He was excluded forensically from her entire neck. His DNA is not under her fingernails.”
Fourth, the defense argued that the medical examiner’s official finding of “undetermined” was not a finding of homicide — and for good reason. The defense contended that Everett police had “jumped to the conclusion that the death was a homicide, despite evidence that pointed elsewhere,” prematurely foreclosing investigative avenues.
On the no-contact order violation, Hunter was explicit: “Having a no-contact order and us admitting to a no-contact order violation is not saying Nestor killed Lindsay.”
The defense rested without calling witnesses or presenting physical evidence.
How Prosecutors Won Without DNA
What the Jury Had Instead of DNA
The absence of Hernandez Melgar’s DNA on Geary’s neck was a fact the prosecution did not contest. What prosecutors contested was its significance.
Their case was built on four interlocking pieces of behavioral evidence, none of which required a forensic match.
The rope. The 7.5-foot rope found near Geary’s body was, according to prosecutors, too long to have been used in a self-inflicted hanging. This detail — a single measurement — was offered not as proof of how Geary died, but as evidence that the scene had been arranged after the fact. Montgomery characterized the rope as placed for appearance rather than use.
The call sequence. Prosecutors argued that the order in which Hernandez Melgar made calls after finding Geary — mother, mother, then 911 — was incompatible with genuine distress and genuine effort to summon help. The argument was that someone who believed there was any chance to save a person calls 911 first. The argument was also that someone who had staged a scene would call family first, because family could be told a story before police arrived. Montgomery was direct: calling mom, not emergency services, was the operational tell.
The 90-second door delay. Prosecutors cited the minute-and-thirty-second delay in opening the door for arriving officers as evidence that Hernandez Melgar was not in a state of panic, not scrambling to help a dying person, not doing anything consistent with someone who had just discovered a tragedy. According to Montgomery’s closing argument, “the defendant did not try to help her. He did not try to help her because he knew she was already dead, and he knew she was already dead because he’s the one who killed her.”
The no-contact order as consciousness of guilt. The domestic violence no-contact order that made Hernandez Melgar’s presence at the apartment a criminal act also served as prosecutorial evidence of a volatile, controlling relationship in its final phase. Combined with the attempted break-in eight days prior, prosecutors established a recent escalation in the pattern of behavior — context that framed the night of November 16 as the endpoint of something, not an isolated event.
Prosecutors also challenged the defense’s digital evidence on its own terms. On the self-harm searches found on Geary’s phone, Montgomery told the jury: “You do not have to assume just because it was Lindsay’s phone that it was Lindsay conducting the suicide research. We know there were two people in the home, both had access to the phone.”
On Geary’s state of mind that day, prosecutors called family members who testified she had appeared happy when they saw her on November 16. She was making plans — for upcoming holidays, for a birthday celebration. “There is nothing to suggest that this woman was preparing to take her life,” Montgomery told the jury in closing.
The verdict indicates that after four weeks of trial and closing arguments delivered on June 17, 2026, jurors found the behavioral picture more compelling than the DNA exclusion.
What “Undetermined” Actually Means
The medical examiner’s “undetermined” finding confused many people following this case. If the medical examiner couldn’t say it was murder, how could a jury convict someone of murder?
The confusion comes from conflating two separate systems operating under two different standards.
Medical examiners classify deaths across five categories: natural, accident, homicide, suicide, and undetermined. A forensic pathologist selects “homicide” when the manner of death — the way the cause of death came about — can be established to a medical certainty as the result of another person’s actions. They select “suicide” when the evidence establishes self-infliction to the same standard. They select “undetermined” when the evidence is genuinely insufficient to reach a confident conclusion in either direction.
“Undetermined” is not a declaration of innocence. It is not an exoneration. It is a statement that the medical evidence, on its own, cannot resolve the question. It reflects the limits of what forensic pathology can establish from physical examination, toxicology, and scene documentation — not the limits of what a jury can establish from the totality of a case.
A jury operates under an entirely different standard and a different evidence set. A jury evaluates all evidence presented at trial — physical, digital, behavioral, testimonial — and is asked whether, taken together, that evidence establishes guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Washington courts instruct juries that circumstantial evidence and direct evidence carry equal weight. A conviction may rest entirely on circumstantial evidence as long as it excludes beyond a reasonable doubt all reasonable hypotheses consistent with innocence.
The jury in this case had what the medical examiner did not: the call sequence, the rope measurement, the door delay, the history of domestic violence, the active no-contact order, the attempted break-in eight days earlier, the testimony of family members about Geary’s apparent state of mind on November 16. The medical examiner had a body and a physical record.
This is why the verdict and the “undetermined” ruling are not in conflict. They were produced by different processes, under different standards, asking different questions. The jury’s answer — guilty — is the legally operative one. The medical examiner’s answer — undetermined — remains part of the forensic record.
What Comes Next
Nestor Hernandez Melgar was convicted on June 22, 2026, on all counts: first-degree murder, first-degree burglary, and violation of a domestic violence no-contact order, each with a domestic violence special aggravator. He remains in custody.
Sentencing is scheduled for July 22, 2026, at Snohomish County Superior Court. First-degree murder in Washington state is a Class A felony. The domestic violence aggravators attached to all three counts create the legal basis for the court to impose an exceptional sentence above the standard range. What sentence will be handed down is a determination for the court.
When the Geary family heard each guilty verdict read on June 22, they shed tears and held hands.
Sentencing is set for July 22. Follow NEP at cassiancreed.com for updates.