The Nestor Hernandez Melgar Case: What Happened to Lindsay Geary

Lindsay Geary, a 36-year-old woman from Everett, Washington, was found dead on her bathroom floor on the night of November 16, 2024. Her boyfriend, Nestor Hernandez Melgar, 29, called 911 and said she had hanged herself. After a four-week trial, a Snohomish County jury reached a different conclusion. On June 22, 2026, Melgar was convicted on all counts — aggravated first-degree murder, first-degree murder, first-degree burglary, and violation of a no-contact order, each carrying a domestic-violence aggravator. On July 22, 2026, Judge Cindy Larsen sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Who Was Lindsay Geary

Lindsay Geary was 36 years old. On the last day of her life, her family remembered her as happy — she was making plans for the upcoming holidays and for birthday celebrations, the ordinary looking-forward of a person expecting more days ahead.

She was a daughter, a partner, and a person her family loved. Everything that follows on this page is about how she died and how the courts have answered for it, but the starting point is simpler and more important: she was a real person, and her life mattered on its own terms, entirely apart from the case that now carries her name.

The Incident: November 16, 2024

On the night of November 16, 2024, Everett police and medical responders were called to an apartment on Madison Street. Inside, Lindsay Geary was found on the bathroom floor with a rope nearby.

Nestor Hernandez Melgar, her boyfriend, was the one who called 911, telling the dispatcher that Geary had hanged herself. According to what later came out at trial, the sequence around that call drew scrutiny: Melgar called Geary’s mother and his own mother before he called 911, and when officers arrived, he took roughly 90 seconds or more to open the door for them.

Melgar was arrested at the scene in connection with the death. At the time, an active domestic-violence no-contact order barred contact between him and Geary — a detail that would later shape the charges against him.

The Charges

On June 22, 2026, the jury convicted Melgar on four counts:

1. Aggravated first-degree murder — the count that carries the life sentence
2. First-degree murder
3. First-degree burglary
4. Violation of a court order — the domestic-violence no-contact order

Each count also carried a special domestic-violence aggravator — a formal finding that the offense was a crime of domestic violence, which can weigh at sentencing. The aggravator is not itself a separate charge; it is an enhancement attached to the counts above.

At sentencing on July 22, 2026, Judge Cindy Larsen vacated two of the four counts — first-degree murder and violation of a court order — on double-jeopardy grounds, because they overlapped with the greater aggravated first-degree murder count. That left the aggravated first-degree murder conviction, which fixes the sentence, and the first-degree burglary conviction.

The Prosecution’s Case

Prosecutors argued a staged-suicide theory: that Melgar killed Geary with the rope and then arranged the bathroom to look as though she had taken her own life.

The State’s case, presented by Snohomish County Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Toni Montgomery, rested on several circumstantial pillars:

• The call sequence. Melgar called Geary’s mother and his own mother before he called 911 — behavior the State framed as scene-management rather than the reflex of someone who had just discovered a loved one dying.
• The door delay. He took roughly 90 seconds or more to open the door for responding officers.
• The rope. The rope was 7.5 feet long, which prosecutors argued was too long to fit the suicide the defense described.
• The relationship history. An active no-contact order was in place; police had been called to the couple roughly eight days earlier over an alleged attempted break-in; and there were multiple prior domestic-dispute police contacts, even as the two reportedly stayed in contact.

Montgomery delivered the State’s closing argument on June 17, 2026.

The Defense’s Case

The defense argued a tragic suicide: that Geary, who they said was intoxicated and struggling with depression and suicidal thoughts, took her own life, and that Melgar woke to find her and acted in shock.

Snohomish County Public Defenders Catherine Bentley (who delivered the opening on June 1) and Allison Hunter (who delivered the closing on June 17) pointed to several threads of reasonable doubt:

• Intoxication. Geary’s blood-alcohol content was .228, according to the Herald and court records.
• Mental-health struggle. The defense described a history of depression and suicidal ideation.
• The forensic exclusion. Melgar’s DNA was not found on Geary’s neck or under her fingernails — he was forensically excluded from her neck, which the defense treated as a central point.
• The phone content. Material recovered from Geary’s phone included suicide-related content (discussed further below).

Melgar did not testify, and the defense rested without presenting evidence, arguing that the State had not met its burden. That argument did not prevail: the jury convicted on all counts.

Why the Medical Examiner Ruled the Manner “Undetermined”

One of the most unusual features of this case is that the jury convicted despite the medical examiner never classifying the death as a homicide.

The ME found the cause of death to be asphyxia due to ligature compression — that is, pressure from the rope. But the ME classified the manner of death as “undetermined” — not homicide, and not suicide.

Those are two different questions. Cause describes the physical mechanism that ended a life. Manner is the broader classification of how it came about — natural, accident, suicide, homicide, or undetermined. A finding of “undetermined” means the medical evidence alone did not allow the examiner to say, to the standard required, which of those categories applied. It is not a finding that the death was a suicide, and it is not a finding that it was a homicide. The ME’s report took seven months to complete.

The Evidence

The trial turned on the tension between a body of circumstantial evidence pointing toward staging and a set of forensic ambiguities pointing toward doubt.

Circumstantial pillars (the State’s case): the family-before-911 call sequence, the roughly 90-second delay opening the door, the 7.5-foot rope the State called too long for the described suicide, and the documented history of domestic conflict and a no-contact order.

Forensic and evidentiary ambiguity (the defense’s case):

• DNA. Melgar’s DNA was not found on Geary’s neck or under her fingernails; he was forensically excluded from her neck.
• Blood-alcohol content. Geary’s BAC was .228, per the Herald.
• The phone. On December 27, 2025 — more than a year after her death — a draft message described as a “suicide-note”-like message (a dream about the relief of death) was found on Geary’s phone, according to the Herald. Who wrote it, or when, cannot be known. Phone data also showed searches that night about how a person could kill themselves; prosecutors noted that both people had access to the phone.

The jury weighed these competing bodies of evidence and resolved them in the State’s favor.

The Verdict

On June 22, 2026, after a four-week trial, the Snohomish County jury found Nestor Hernandez Melgar guilty on all counts: aggravated first-degree murder, first-degree murder, first-degree burglary, and violation of a no-contact order, each with a domestic-violence aggravator.

The verdict is notable precisely because of the ambiguity described above. The medical examiner had left the manner of death “undetermined,” and Melgar’s DNA was absent from Geary’s neck. Yet the jury — applying the criminal standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt to the full record, not the ME’s manner-of-death classification — reached the conclusion the examiner’s report did not: that this was a homicide, and that Melgar was responsible. A jury and a medical examiner answer different questions under different standards, and here the jury resolved what the ME’s science alone could not.

Cassian Creed compiled this Neural Edge Publishing case file from the Snohomish County Superior Court record and contemporaneous courtroom reporting, keeping the jury’s findings separate from the medical examiner’s undetermined manner-of-death classification.

Sentencing

On July 22, 2026, in Snohomish County Superior Court, Judge Cindy Larsen sentenced Melgar to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

That sentence flows from the aggravated first-degree murder conviction. Under Washington law, aggravated first-degree murder carries a presumptive sentence of life without the possibility of parole — the most serious sentence available in the state. Judge Larsen also imposed 34 months on the first-degree burglary count, to run concurrently with the life term. The first-degree murder and court-order counts were vacated on double-jeopardy grounds and carry no separate sentence.

Melgar has 30 days from sentencing to file an appeal.

What Happens Next

With sentencing complete, the next milestone is the appeal. Melgar has 30 days from the July 22, 2026 sentencing to file. This page will be kept current as the appeal window runs and if any appeal is filed.

Timeline

• ~September 2024 (approximate): A domestic-violence no-contact order is issued, roughly two months before Geary’s death.
• ~November 8, 2024 (approximate): Everett police are called over an alleged attempted break-in, roughly eight days before her death. (Multiple prior domestic-dispute police contacts also preceded this.)
• November 16, 2024: Lindsay Geary, 36, is found dead on the bathroom floor of her Everett apartment; Melgar is arrested at the scene.
• After the incident: Charges are filed — aggravated first-degree murder, first-degree murder, first-degree burglary, and violation of a no-contact order, each with a DV aggravator.
• December 27, 2025: A draft “suicide-note”-like message is discovered on Geary’s phone, more than a year after her death (per the Herald).
• ~Mid-2025 (approximate): The medical examiner’s report is completed, roughly seven months after death; cause ruled asphyxia due to ligature compression, manner “undetermined.”
• June 1, 2026: Trial opens; defense delivers its opening statement.
• June 17, 2026: Closing arguments.
• June 22, 2026: Jury convicts Melgar on all four counts — aggravated first-degree murder, first-degree murder, first-degree burglary, and violation of a court order.
• July 22, 2026: Judge Cindy Larsen sentences Melgar to life without the possibility of parole on the aggravated first-degree murder count (34 months concurrent on the burglary count); the first-degree murder and court-order counts are vacated on double-jeopardy grounds.

Follow the Lindsay Geary Case

This page is the canonical hub for the Nestor Hernandez Melgar case. For deeper analysis of specific threads, these companion pages go further:

• Sentencing updates and lookup — the page covering the July 22, 2026 sentencing and the life-without-parole term imposed.
• A murder staged as a suicide: the narrative — the full story of the night of November 16, 2024, and the staged-suicide theory the State proved at trial.
• Anatomy of a murder trial — a closer look at how prosecutors won a murder conviction on circumstantial evidence despite an “undetermined” manner of death.
• How Washington courts work — a plain-English explainer on charges, aggravators, and sentencing in Washington, using this case as the guide.
• Court calendar — tracked hearing and sentencing dates across the cases we follow.
• Voir dire simulator — an interactive look at how a jury like the one in this case gets selected.

If you or someone you know needs support: 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline — call or text 988. National Domestic Violence Hotline — 1-800-799-7233 (text START to 88788). RAINN — 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).

Sources

• Ian Davis-Leonard, “Jury convicts man in Everett murder staged as suicide,” HeraldNet (The Daily Herald), June 22, 2026.
• Ian Davis-Leonard, “Life sentence for man convicted of girlfriend’s 2024 murder in Everett,” HeraldNet (The Daily Herald), July 22, 2026.
• Snohomish County Superior Court record.

Last verified: July 22, 2026.