Prosecutors last month charged a Colorado man awaiting trial for three murders with a fourth murder.
Arapahoe County prosecutors on February 25 charged Ricky Roybal-Smith with the 2022 murder of Meg Eberhart, who was killed on June 22, 2022, the Englewood Herald reports.
Roybal-Smith was already in jail for three murders last year, KUSA reports. Aurora Police were investigating him for the murders of two homeless men within an hour of each other on June 29, 2025, when Denver Police arrested him for a hit-and-run involving two pedestrians. He was booked into the Denver jail that night.
At 2 a.m. the next day, Roybal-Smith told a deputy that his cellmate, Vincent Chacon — who was in jail for a traffic violation and was about to be released — was choking on an apple and needed help. But an autopsy found that Chacon’s death was a homicide — “asphyxia due to external compression of the neck” or strangulation.
Roybal-Smith was charged with the murders of Jesse Shafer and Scott Davenport, the two homeless men in Aurora, but charges for the murder of Chacon weren’t filed until November.
And the suspect was on parole during all four murders, including Eberhart’s in 2022. KUSA reports that he was on parole for a 2015 vehicular assault/DUI case at the time, and, more recently, was paroled in 2023 while serving time for a menacing case in 2022 — the day before Eberhart’s murder when he went berserk at a local Walmart, threatening customers, Law&Crime reported.
Key to the many early releases was an inexplicable change in Roybal-Smith’s classification from “high risk” to reoffend to “moderate” in 2022, although he’d been paroled from various charges four times since 2011. That status remained the same all the way through the 2025 murders, when Schafer was stabbed some 15 times, and Davenport was stabbed roughly 90 times in the back.
But the Eberhart murder was also perplexing. Eberhart had been traveling in Lyft on the morning o June 22, 2022, the Herald said. She asked to stop to use the restroom, and the driver heard her scream. He activated the emergency alert on his phone, calling for police, who found her unconscious. She was transported to a hospital, but never regained consciousness and died several days later.
An autopsy was unable to determine a cause of death, but Englewood police recommended a murder charge against Roybal-Smith, the parolee who was found nearby and denied any involvement. The case was handed over to Arapahoe County prosecutors, who sat on it until February.
Now, he’s charged with second degree murder in Eberhart’s death, two murder charges in the Aurora stabbings, and the inmate’s murder in Denver County, where he has been in jail since last summer.
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[Featured image: Ricky Roybal-Smith/Denver Police Department]
