A longtime Kosciusko County attorney is moving into a new phase of his life by shifting into a similar career from his past.
David Kolbe and his wife, Kathy, are set to leave the area this week for Durango, Colo. There, the former Kosciusko County prosecutor will become an assistant district attorney for the state's Sixth Judicial District, which encompasses La Plata, San Juan and Archuleta counties.
He said the move was in part to be closer to family as well as to live near the mountains.
"I was born in ... the Appalachian Mountains," he said. "So I don't know if it's genetic or if it's something from the time you're little, but people are either ocean people or mountain people when they want to go somewhere fun, and it's mountains for us."
He said, "(The Durango) area is called the Switzerland of the west, so our hearts just became enamored with it. John Muir, the great environmentalist, once said, 'The mountains are calling, and I must go.' So it's a mix of family and the outdoors more than anything (that motivated the move)."
Kolbe said he considers his new position as "an extra credit job."
"(People have asked) 'Are you retiring?'” he said. "I say, 'What does that mean?' ... Age is a number if you're healthy, and so to me, OK, there are transitions, so (the new) job, after 42 years here, is an extra credit job."
Through the role, Kolbe will help train three other assistant DAs. Two of them are only nine months out of law school.
He said he's interested to work with a category of law enforcement he's never done before, tribal police, with there being several reservations around the judicial district. Kolbe's also thrilled to work on some major cases coming up in the district, mentioning there are "six open murder (cases)."
"(The job overall) is a going back, redoing a different part of my career as prosecution because I did that in the '90s here," he said. "So I'm just really, really looking forward to it."
Kolbe's law degree is from Valparaiso University School of Law. Before that, he obtained a degree in modern European history from Indiana University South Bend, having transferred from DePauw University.
Among his career highlights is his position as a senior visiting professor for the Center for International Legal Studies in Salzburg, Austria. Kolbe's had that role since 2008, teaching European law students about American criminal law and procedure "as a comparative legal program."
Kolbe had teaching stints in Ukraine, Latvia, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Albania and the country of Georgia before the program was stopped due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
A more local career highlight for Kolbe was his obtaining an acquittal in a federal court trial in 2016, which he notes is rare.
Although he will be advising attorneys in his new job, Kolbe said he will miss helping his colleagues in the Warsaw area.
"When you're the oldest one or one of the top two or three oldest in the room ... a lot of folks come to you and say, 'How do you do this?' So it's really being able to be a mentor and an advisor ... so I will miss largely the relationships," he said. "We have a really good group of judges now, and people try to do the right thing. I mean everybody's got their different personalities, but yeah, I'm going to miss the role of being the (elder statesman)."