At 40 years of age, Marston was living in Gerlach, Nevada, after battling drug and alcohol addictions. In the rural community, he had helped his mother Elizabeth at the school where she worked and he did ranch work. Marston had been sober for six months. Marston had planned on going back to Los Angeles after getting his sobriety back. On an October 30th evening road excursion, Marston was involved in a single car accident driving a 1985 Ford F-150 truck. It is speculated that he could have fallen asleep behind the wheel, awakening when the truck drifted across the lane, correcting the truck's direction, flipped multiple times and landed on the dirt roadway shoulder. The crash occurred on State Route 447 near the tiny town of Nixon. The actor was not wearing a seat belt and was thrown through the truck's windshield. Marston suffered several broken vertebrae in his back and neck. He was flown to a Reno hospital with critical injuries. According to medical officials, there were no drugs nor alcohol involved. His mother reported two weeks later, "Nathaniel passed away peacefully as I held him in my arms. Had Nathaniel lived he would have required a ventilator and would never have been able to utter one more word and would have been sentenced to life as a quadriplegic. A condition that Nate would never have been able to tolerate." Nathaniel's pain and suffering from a broken neck and spinal injuries ended at 3:15 PST, November 11th, 2015, survived by his mother, Elizabeth Jackson, his wife of nine years, Rita Bias (m: 2006-2015), his stepfather and his siblings.
