On August 26th, 2022 a man was arrested for attempted murder in Fruita Colorado.

Nathan D. Brach, 41, was arrested for 8 different charges these past weeks. According to online Mesa County Jail Records these charges includes attempted second degree murder, assault with strangulation, false imprisonment, menacing and more.

The woman involved in the incident told the officers that she and Brach were coming home from a friend’s house. She said they were planning to just hang out and drink wine, but when Brach started to question what the woman was doing on her phone, she alleges he broke both her phone and a wine glass.

According to the victim, things escalated from here. She stated that Brach pulled a knife out on her and attempted to stab and cut her with it. The woman claims she was able to get the knife away from Brach and injured him in an attempt of self defense. Brach said he then proceeded to grab her by the throat and suffocate her. She then reported that he pushed her onto the floor, continuing to strangle her and then struck her with a power tool, knocking her unconscious.

The woman told police later that when she woke up, she was wrapped in blue plastic. According to The Daily Sentinel, The victim told police she heard Brach speaking on the phone outside. “I think she’s dead, I need help getting rid of the body.”

The victim fought her way out of the plastic and made her way to lock the front door. Only then was she able to call dispatch to get help.

The 911 call originally started out as a burglary dispatch around 1 o’clock in the morning. The Fruita police department responded soon after and found Brach and a woman in the house. The woman was on the other side of the house on the phone with dispatch.

It’s not everyday that you would hear of an attempted murder in Fruita. There are the occasional robberies, car accidents, house fires. These are the calls dispatch would usually face. But on August 26th it was different.

Defined by the FBI’s UCR, violent crime statistics are composed of four offenses: murder/homicide, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Violent crimes are those offenses which involve force or threat of force. Fruita’s violent crime rates will likely continue to worsen as the city grows.

Fruita has always been a small town with a low violent crime rate of 124.76 as of 2016 according to macrotrends.net, but with the growing city, this quickly escalated to 192.74 as of 2017. This is a 54.49% increase from the year before. The rate then skyrocketed to 224.05 in 2018.
There have been many studies done on the concept of the relationship between population and crime rate. One example is “Establishing the statistical relationship between population size and UCR crime rate: Its impact and implications” by James J. Nolan III.

The research shows statistical proof of a positive correlation between population size and crime rates.”The analysis of the 2000 UCR crime data for the 1,294 cities with populations over 25,000 revealed a significant positive relationship between crime rate and population size, indicating that the higher populated cities reported the higher crime rates.”

According to the US census, Fruita has an estimated population of 13,508 as of July 1st, 2021. It is estimated that Fruita is going to continue to grow and it’s proven that with that growth, crime rates will likely increase.

People like Nathan D. Brach are out there. They’re in our city now, and there is bound to be more coming with the rapid growing population. Stay safe out there Fruita.