The sheriff's office set out a drop box so people could turn in leftover painkillers. The idea was simple. Get the pills off the shelf before they end up on the street.
Sgt. Michael Horn, a ten-year veteran, volunteered to help run it.
Pills started disappearing at about the same time. Oxycontin. Viagra. Cialis. The losses went on for roughly eight months before the department moved the collected medications out of an unsecured office and into the secure evidence room.
Horn was arrested in January 2014. He had failed a drug test.
Empty pill bottles with other people's names on them were found in his squad car. He was accused of driving that car under the influence, and of coercing an elderly woman out of her pain medication.
A deputy summed it up for the Pahrump Valley Times afterward.
"It was the department's worst kept secret."
Horn pleaded guilty to two felonies, misconduct of a public officer and possession of a controlled substance. The coercion allegation was dropped as unsubstantiated.
He was the son-in-law of Assistant Sheriff Rick Marshall, who at the time was a leading candidate to replace Sheriff Tony DeMeo.
Three months after Horn's arrest, Marshall was himself arrested, by his own deputies, for pulling up campaign signs that read "Anybody But Rick for Sheriff." and stayed in command through the whole case.
Here is the part that still matters.
A deputy went to his commander about Horn before the arrest.
That commander was Capt. Bill Becht. He described the conversation to the Times this way: a deputy came to him and said Horn wanted to count the pills he was turning in.
Asked what he did about it, Becht said he thought he talked to narcotics about it. He said he did not believe it was shut down by the sheriff or anything. He said he never personally saw strange behavior or physical proof that Horn was doing anything wrong. Hindsight, he said, is 20/20.
Nine years later, Bill Becht was the undersheriff of Nye County in Joe McGill's first week in office. He has since left the position. When he left, and why, has never been reported.
That is the shape of the thing. A problem is known inside the building. Nothing formal happens. The people around it keep working. The public finds out later, if at all.
Five arrests, zero answers
Since 2016, five sworn members of the Nye County Sheriff's Office have been arrested on criminal allegations. Not one outcome has ever been reported by any news outlet, including the Pahrump Valley Times.
Deputy Robert Cathcart, arrested in 2016 after he allegedly choked his girlfriend and barricaded himself inside with weapons.
Deputy Michalean Soprano, arrested in 2019 for allegedly handing his girlfriend confidential child-welfare records.
Deputy Kevin McBrayer, an 18-year veteran, arrested that same year for using a controlled substance while on duty.
Deputy James Christiansen, arrested in 2022 on suspicion of child abuse. The office said it would not release further details.
Captain David Boruchowitz, who in 2022 turned himself in on burglary and harassment allegations, then emailed the media his own press release and his own booking photo, saying he had investigated his own case honestly.
No convictions were reported. No acquittals. No dismissals. Nothing about whether any of them kept a badge. The stories ran, and then the record simply stops.
Some deputies accused of crimes here were cleared, and that belongs in the same ledger. Deputy Daryal Taylor was acquitted by a jury in about thirty minutes.
Charges against Deputy William Tidmarsh were dismissed.
Deputy James Ramos shot at an unarmed fleeing shoplifter behind the Pahrump Walmart in 2020, and the district attorney declined to prosecute, finding no corrupt intent. Those men were cleared, and the public knows it, because somebody reported the outcome.
That is the point. Clearing an officer in public is a service to the officer. Silence serves nobody.
Hired anyway
In January 2022, the sheriff's office hired a deputy named Michael Burke.
Oregon had permanently stripped Burke of his police certification. The Nevada Supreme Court laid out why in a 2024 opinion. During a 2007 arrest, Burke bent a cooperative passenger's thumb and threatened to break his finger unless he gave up a name. He disabled his in-car video. During the drive, he stopped twice, each time pulling the man's shirt over his head and forcing his head between his knees, injuring his ear. On the second stop, he bounced up and down on him.
Two other excessive force complaints had already been filed against Burke in Oregon. One came from a woman who said he grabbed her by the hair and slammed her face into the trunk of his patrol car. She had a facial cut, bruising and swelling around both eyes, and hair torn from her head. A witness backed her up. There was a dent on the trunk lid.
The state Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, known as POST, emailed Sheriff Sharon Wehrly directly to say Burke could not be certified in Nevada.
The sheriff's office argued POST was required to certify him anyway. It petitioned the commission to reconsider. The commissioners voted unanimously to deny him. One said Burke did not have a background worthy of even reaching the hiring stage.
POST then told the sheriff's office that Burke could not sit for the state certification exam.
The sheriff's office let him sit for it anyway.
Burke sued to force POST to certify him. He lost in district court, and lost again in the Nevada Supreme Court in November 2024.
The state stopped this one. The county did not.
Promoted anyway
The clearest test of what this agency does with a troubled record is David Boruchowitz.
In 2013, state investigators found he had shown seized explicit video to colleagues at the sheriff's office, reportedly including footage taken from a child sex-offense case. He admitted it. He said he had shown it to "a lot of people" for coping and comic relief, and called it common practice. The county settled related litigation for $35,000. He kept his job., reportedly including footage taken from a child sex-offense case. He admitted it. He said he had shown it to "a lot of people" for coping and comic relief, and called it common practice. The county settled related litigation for $35,000. He kept his job.
In 2015, the FBI looked into his relationships with people he had arrested. He was never charged. He received a ten-hour suspension for an inappropriate relationship with a probationer.
Wehrly promoted him to sergeant, then lieutenant, then captain, and gave him a command excellence award. By 2022 he was earning about $119,000, roughly $18,000 more than the sheriff's own base salary.
In 2019 he arrested Angela Evans, the chief executive of Valley Electric Association, on a theft case he had built. She was held more than five hours while her home was searched. Federal prosecutors later established the case was fabricated. Boruchowitz pleaded guilty to a civil rights violation and wire fraud (United States v. Boruchowitz, 2:23-cr-00149).
U.S. District Judge Andrew Gordon called the crimes serious and brazen. He told Boruchowitz he had used the badge and the office as a way to slander someone's character.
He was sentenced to probation. No prison. No restitution, though prosecutors sought more than $244,000. He retired in late 2024 and collects a public pension reported at around $72,000 a year.
Evans lost her career and left the state.
Every warning sign in that record was known to his supervisors before the Evans arrest. He was promoted through all of them.
The shootings nobody ruled on
Between April 2022 and May 2024, Nye County deputies shot six people. Three died.
Deputy Nicholas Huggins was involved in three of them in three years: a 2022 roadblock where deputies fired 14 rounds, the fatal 2023 shooting of John Beaudoin, 67, who had told dispatch he intended to kill himself, and the 2024 shooting of Michael Byers, 81, during a welfare check. In the Byers case, by the sheriff's own account, Huggins fired five rounds before Byers returned fire.
About three months later, Huggins was back on patrol. He wrote the arrest report in a drunken driving case on Aug. 28, 2024.
Sergeant Cory Fowles fatally shot Joshua Reese, 27, on Thanksgiving Day 2023. Fowles is now the undersheriff.
On Halloween 2023, Sheriff Joe McGill himself shot a man. Rodd Fernandes, a retired firefighter, had called dispatch to say he was suicidal. Deputies said he pointed his gun toward them. McGill fired one round from an AR-15 and wounded him. The state reviewed it criminally. The sheriff's office ran its own internal affairs review of its own sheriff. McGill was back on full duty in about a week.
No finding from any of those reviews has ever been published. Not one, in any of the six shootings.
Shortly after the Beaudoin killing, the sheriff's office quietly left the reality television program _On Patrol: Live_, thanking fans without saying why.
Who checks the checkers
Nye County does have a civilian oversight body. Almost nobody knows it exists, and nobody can watch it work.
The Peace Officer Advisory Review Board has twelve members appointed by the county commissioners. It reviews citizen complaints against deputies. It reviews completed internal investigations. It can recommend raising or lowering the discipline the sheriff proposes, or clearing the deputy entirely.
Under state law, its proceedings are closed to the public.
That is the county's answer to the question of who watches the sheriff. A board the public cannot attend, reviewing investigations the public cannot read, recommending discipline the public is never told about.
Everywhere else, the agency under scrutiny is the agency doing the scrutinizing. The sheriff's office investigates its own shootings, including one by the sheriff. It investigates its own deaths in custody. It decides what the public sees.
When outside review was actually requested, it fell apart. In March 2021, deputies stopped Tyler Kennedy at a travel center in Amargosa Valley. Body camera video showed they recognized he was impaired. He admitted opioid use. They found fentanyl and burnt foil. No field sobriety test was given. They handed back his keys.
About an hour later, Kennedy crashed head-on into a family on U.S. 95, killing Michael Durmeier, his 12-year-old daughter Georgia, and Lauren Starcevich, and critically injuring a six-year-old boy.
Four employees received written reprimands. A fifth received nothing. Wehrly first said two policies had been violated, then narrowed it to one, the improper disposal of drug evidence. The office has a policy requiring officers to stop impaired drivers. Nobody was found to have violated it.
Then-District Attorney Chris Arabia asked the state to investigate. The state refused, citing a conflict of interest, since a Highway Patrol trooper had been on the original call. No deputy was ever charged.
The records door closes
Since 2023, the flow of basic information out of Nye County has narrowed sharply, and the sheriff says it is not his doing.
McGill has said publicly that District Attorney Brian Kunzi has stopped his staff from releasing arrest reports to the press and the public, reversing what the county did for years. When the Review-Journal asked for ten arrest reports in May 2024, the office refused, saying such materials are not public records until a prosecution ends. In Clark County, arrest reports are routinely released within days.
McGill put the power arrangement plainly: Kunzi is his attorney, the county's attorney, and the one who defends the sheriff's office when it gets sued.
Kunzi has said his position was misconstrued, that basic facts can still be released, and that he will not put out witness statements and investigative reports while a case is open. He has said he does not want to pollute the jury pool.
That reasoning has limits the public can see. Kunzi threatened to "go to war" with the Pahrump Valley Times over arrest reports and booking photos in 2024, then reversed himself after speaking with the Times' lawyer.
In the David Provenza case, where a 70-year-old Pahrump man alleges Deputy Jason Ruesch knocked him down, punched him and used a taser on him four times after he called for help with a neighbor's dog, his attorney says the county withheld body camera footage for seven months and it took a federal lawsuit to get it.
Kunzi says the deputy acted appropriately and that Provenza was the aggressor. The allegations have not been proven.
Ruesch stayed on patrol. Ten weeks after the encounter, the sheriff's office promoted him in a national police trade story about a bystander helping him subdue a resisting suspect.
The county has a long habit of prosecutors and police tangling in public. In 2010, District Attorney Bob Beckett was arrested, then appointed his own special prosecutor to investigate then-Sheriff Tony DeMeo and his deputies. DeMeo said Beckett had no such authority and refused to cooperate. Nye County has had six district attorneys since 1994.
Nobody ever counted the pills
Two years after the Horn case, in April 2016, the Review-Journal reported that a volunteer evidence technician at the sheriff's office held a recovered stolen firearm for eight days without checking it in, then released it to the wrong man, who sold it.
The gun's owner, Richard Marsh, said he was told the Nye County evidence room held property dating to the 1960s, and that it was impossible to tell what was there and what was missing."That's very serious," Marsh said. "What else was stolen?"
Wehrly said it was an open investigation and she could not say more. No resolution was ever reported.
There has never been a published audit, inventory or external review of the Nye County Sheriff's Office evidence room. Not after Horn. Not after the gun. Not since.
The county also does not publish a register of legal settlements. When Angela Evans settled her suit in December 2023, the Review-Journal reported the figure at $400,000. The Pahrump Valley Times described it as undisclosed. Both cannot be right.
In November 2018, two deputies and a sergeant were placed on leave after the office failed to act on two earlier calls to a home where a disabled mother and son were held captive. Their names were never released. The outcome was never announced.
A deputy told the Pahrump Valley Times in 2014 that Michael Horn's drug problem was the department's worst kept secret.
Twelve years later, the more useful question is not what the department knows. It is what anyone outside it is ever allowed to find out.
The Pahrump Valley Times has filed public records requests with the Nevada Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training seeking certification and decertification records for every deputy named in this story, with the [Nevada Department of Public Safety](https://dps.nv.gov/) for its findings in each deputy-involved shooting since 2022, and with Nye County risk management for a full accounting of settlements paid on behalf of sheriff's office personnel since 2000. Responses will be reported as they arrive.
A separate detail : Tony DeMeo sat on the POST Commission, the state body that revokes certifications, and was recognized as an outgoing commissioner in May 2016. The former Nye sheriff was on the board that decides these cases.
