The delayed charge in Meg Eberhart’s 2022 death has recast an old investigation that once stalled on unanswered medical and legal questions.
ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — Nearly four years after Meg Eberhart was found unconscious near an Englewood light-rail station, prosecutors have charged Ricky Lee Roybal-Smith with murder, transforming a case long clouded by uncertainty into an active homicide prosecution.
That shift matters well beyond one file. Roybal-Smith, 38, was already accused in three 2025 killings in Aurora and Denver, and the new case suggests investigators now see a longer arc of violence than the public first understood. Eberhart’s death had lingered because authorities believed a crime occurred but lacked a straightforward medical ruling that could support an earlier homicide filing. The latest charge changes that posture from suspicion to prosecution.
The case began before sunrise on June 22, 2022. Eberhart was riding in a Lyft when she asked to stop near the Englewood station area. According to accounts later cited by investigators, the driver heard her scream after she got out. He triggered an emergency alert, and officers responding to the area found her unconscious. She was taken to a hospital and died several days later. For family members and detectives, the next stretch was marked by a hard contradiction: police believed they had a suspect and a violent encounter, but the death itself remained difficult to classify with precision in a way that would hold up in court.
Roybal-Smith surfaced early in that investigation. Englewood police treated him as a main suspect and said he ran from the scene, but prosecutors did not immediately file murder charges because the cause of death was ruled undetermined. The timing made the case more striking. Just one day before Eberhart was attacked, Roybal-Smith had been accused of threatening customers during an outburst at an Englewood Walmart. He was later sentenced to four years in prison in that case. What looked at first like two separate episodes in the same city now reads differently with the murder filing in place: a public disturbance, then a fatal assault, then years of legal delay.
That delay ended only after another string of violence brought Roybal-Smith back into public view. Authorities say he was paroled again in January 2025. On June 29, two men were killed in Aurora within hours of each other. Police said Jesse Shafer, 27, was found stabbed on Moline Street, and Scott Davenport, 61, was later found stabbed near Peoria Street south of East Colfax Avenue. Investigators concluded the attacks were connected. Later that same day, Roybal-Smith was arrested in Denver in a hit-and-run involving pedestrians. By early the next morning, officials say, his jail cellmate Vincent Chacon, 36, was dead after a strangulation.
The piling up of later allegations changed the frame around the older case. What had once been an unresolved Englewood death now looked, to prosecutors and investigators, like a missed early marker in a broader pattern. Reporting on correctional records also found that Roybal-Smith had been labeled very high risk for recidivism for years before being downgraded to moderate risk, a change that remained in place when he became eligible for parole again. Whether that downgrade was proper has become its own point of scrutiny. But for Eberhart’s case, the more immediate effect was practical: once prosecutors were willing to charge, the 2022 death stopped being a cold question and became the first chapter in a larger prosecution story.
The legal road ahead is still fragmented. The Eberhart case is in Arapahoe County and carries a second-degree murder charge. The Aurora killings led to first-degree murder charges, and the Denver jail death produced another homicide case. Prosecutors will have to prove each one separately, with different witnesses, forensic evidence and timelines. Unknowns remain. Authorities have not publicly answered every question about what new evidence or legal reasoning pushed the 2022 case across the charging line, and the original medical uncertainty remains part of the history that defense lawyers are likely to examine closely.
Even so, the emotional center of the case has shifted. For years, Eberhart’s death was discussed in the language of uncertainty: suspicious, unresolved, undetermined. The new charge replaces that vocabulary with something sharper and more public. Detectives say they never stopped working the file. Prosecutors now say they are ready to put it before a court. And a death that once seemed likely to fade into a difficult local record is now firmly tied to one of Colorado’s most closely watched homicide cases.
The case now moves from long delay to active litigation, with the next milestones expected in Arapahoe County court while the separate 2025 homicide cases continue on their own schedules.
Author note: Last updated March 31, 2026.