By Logan Smith
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WELD COUNTY, Colorado (KCNC) — A 73-year-old Wyoming man was sentenced Friday for aiding in the suicide of a co-worker in Colorado.
Mark Switzer received a four-year prison term in the Colorado Department of Corrections from Weld County District Court Judge Audrey Galloway. Switzer pleaded guilty in February to a manslaughter charge. Prosecutors, in turn, dropped the first degree murder charge which Switzer was originally arrested on.
Switzer was accused of shooting 49-year-old Nathan “Tom” Combs in May of 2017. Combs’s body was found near a tractor trailer parked west of Hereford, Colorado. Combs was shot twice in the head.
The two men were friends and co-workers at a Laramie trucking company.
Combs was facing a possible prison sentence. He had been arrested a year earlier, according to a Wyoming news outlet’s report, on child sexual exploitation charges. Combs, who was married and 48 years old at the time, allegedly exchanged explicit photos with a 16-year-old Laramie County girl over a three-month period before his arrest. The two also had consensual sex at the girl’s home and in Combs’s semi truck while parked at an Interstate 80 truck stop, the victim told authorities, per the news report.
In the weeks leading up to his death, Combs purchased a life insurance policy, later doubled its payout to his wife, and signed a will leaving all his possessions to his wife, according to the affidavit.
Combs also had a telling conversation with another friend before his death. Investigators learned Combs had told the friend he “wasn’t goin’ back to jail” and “I know what they do to people like that,” an apparent reference to the treatment of sex crime offenders by other inmates, per the affidavit.
Combs also told his friend, “Don’t tell anybody but I’ve got it arranged,” as stated in the affidavit. “Look after (my wife), stop in say hi to her and see how she’s doing,” Combs allegedly continued.
The friend told Combs, “You’re scaring me,” according to the affidavit.
Combs responded, “Don’t be. I’m not.”
Investigators keyed in on Switzer after Combs’s wife conveyed the details of a conversation between the two days after the murder. In it, according to the affidavit, Switzer told Combs’s wife that Combs had asked Switzer to kill him. Switzer admitted to her that he shot Combs in the head while Combs was kneeling and praying.
Combs was killed in Colorado eight miles south of Switzer’s residence near Carpenter, Wyoming.
Investigators recovered a .22 caliber rifle from Switzer’s truck with a search warrant. The forensic analysis to compare the shell casings found at the scene to the gun took extraordinarily long. A regional laboratory initially found its test results to be inconclusive. An FBI lab then determined the casings to be a match to those extruded by the Ruger rifle — four years after forensic testing began.
Weld County investigators also uncovered text messages between Switzer and Combs leading up to the event. Switzer eventually confessed to investigators to telling Combs’s wife that he shot Combs because that was what Combs wanted.
Switzer was arrested in March 2023.
“This was not a momentary lapse in judgement or a mistake,” 19th Judicial Deputy District Attorney Katherine Fitzgerald said during Friday’s sentencing hearing (according to the DA’s Office). “This was a calculated plan and a deliberate action. Regardless of whether the victim asked him to assist in his death, this defendant still killed Nathan Combs and this type of behavior won’t be tolerated in our community.”
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