A Denver-area prosecution built around one violent day in 2025 has grown to include a separate 2022 death in Englewood.
AURORA, Colo. — The Colorado case against Ricky Lee Roybal-Smith first drew wide attention because authorities said three people died within hours during a June 2025 crime spree, and prosecutors have now added a fourth homicide charge tied to a 2022 death in Englewood.
The immediate drama of the case still sits in those 2025 hours. Two men were found stabbed in Aurora on June 29, and a third man was dead inside the Denver jail before sunrise the next day. But the new charge in Meg Eberhart’s death gives prosecutors a longer narrative to present, one that begins not in Aurora or the jail, but years earlier near a light-rail station south of Denver.
Investigators say the June 29, 2025 sequence began around 1:45 a.m., when officers were sent to the 1500 block of Moline Street and found Jesse Shafer, 27, with fatal stab wounds. Hours later, just before 6:30 p.m., officers were called to Peoria Street south of East Colfax Avenue, where Scott Davenport, 61, was found dead near a bus stop. Police later said the attacks were connected. Coroner findings later cited in news reports described heavy violence in both cases, including about 15 stab wounds to Shafer and about 90 to Davenport. Both men were identified as homeless, adding another layer of public concern in a part of the metro area where service agencies and police already knew the victims’ environment well.
By late that same day, the case crossed city lines. Roybal-Smith, 38, was arrested in Denver after a hit-and-run involving pedestrians near Galapago Street and West 9th Avenue and was booked into jail at about 11 p.m. What followed turned an already severe homicide investigation into something broader. Around 2:15 a.m. on June 30, deputies responded after Roybal-Smith reported that his cellmate, Vincent Chacon, 36, was choking on an apple. Chacon was pronounced dead, and investigators later said the death was caused by external compression of the neck. That allegation made the jail not just a holding point after violence, but another crime scene in the same unfolding story.
Only after that cascade of events did the public fully return to the older Englewood file. Prosecutors now say Roybal-Smith was responsible for the June 22, 2022 death of Meg Eberhart, who was found unconscious after getting out of a Lyft near a light-rail station around 3 a.m. She died days later. The case had remained unresolved because the cause of death was ruled undetermined, even though police treated the encounter as criminal. The timing around that case has become a key part of the narrative: one day earlier, Roybal-Smith had been accused of threatening customers at an Englewood Walmart. He later received a four-year sentence in that case, but he did not serve all of it before becoming eligible for parole again.
That release is now central to how the 2025 spree is understood. Reporting on Roybal-Smith’s correctional history found that he had often been labeled very high risk for recidivism before a later classification marked him as moderate risk. He was paroled again in January 2025. Critics have focused on that downgrade because it remained in place before the Aurora killings and the jail death. At the same time, another set of questions grew from Chacon’s death: why a man accused of violent conduct was housed with him, and how quickly deputies recognized that the original choking account might be false. Those issues are administrative, but they have shaped public reaction nearly as much as the criminal allegations themselves.
The prosecutions now move on parallel tracks. The Eberhart case in Arapahoe County carries second-degree murder. The Aurora stabbings brought first-degree murder charges, and the Denver jail death brought another homicide case. Each file will rise or fall on its own evidence, from witness statements and scene work to medical findings and jail records. Some questions remain unanswered in public, including what finally changed in the Eberhart case after years of delay and whether any agency review will formally address the parole scoring or jail placement decisions that preceded the deaths.
What gives the story its force is not only the number of deaths, but the compression of events. In the public record, the case first looked like a burst of violence over one day and one night. Now prosecutors are asking the courts to view it as something larger and older, with warning signs in Englewood three years earlier and consequences that spread from sidewalks to a detention cell. The charge list has grown, but so has the scope of what officials may have to explain.
Homicide cases will proceed in county courtrooms while the added 2022 charge keeps widening the frame around what happened before and after June 29, 2025.
Author note: Last updated March 31, 2026.