Bill Carns said that about his 2015 arrest. He was right. Nye County spent the next seven years handing him things.
On Saturday, January 31, 2026, a Nye County deputy booked a Pahrump man into the county jail on a felony warrant.
Five counts. Two involve child sexual abuse material. Three involve guns, including building a firearm with no serial number.
The name on the booking sheet is CARNS, WILLIAM T.
At his last court date, May 5, 2026, no charges had been filed.
None have been reported since. He has not been convicted of anything. He is presumed innocent, and this story takes no side on whether he did it.
It takes a side on something else. This is the second time Nye County deputies arrested Bill Carns. It is the second time the case went quiet.
Fifteen months with a badge
Las Vegas Metro confirmed that William T. Carns was one of its officers from February 1995 to May 1996. Fifteen months. That is the whole career.
He spent the next thirty years in Pahrump bringing it up.
In 2015, deputies said he brought it up to them.
The traffic stop
On June 1, 2015, a Nye County deputy pulled Carns over in a Walmart parking lot on Highway 160 in Pahrump. The car had a plate the deputy believed was fictitious.
Carns gave him a Metro personnel number.
He picked the wrong deputy. The officer who made that stop was Joseph McGill, who had joined the sheriff's office in 2014 after retiring from Las Vegas Metro with 26 years in patrol, narcotics and detective work. Carns had been a Metro officer for fifteen months, two decades earlier.
McGill arrested him for impersonating a peace officer, fictitious plates, and no registration. The sheriff's office said it was the third time Carns had used an officer number to get out of a ticket. Carns said the other two were traffic stops in the prior six months, and that if the accusation were true he would have been arrested on the spot.
He was chairman of the Nye County Republican Central Committee at the time.
He was held about five hours and released. Then he told the newspaper what was going to happen.
"I imagine that this charge will never see the light of day. The way to do it is fighting it in court and that's exactly what I'll do."
The district attorney was Angela Bello. No charges were ever filed. Eight days after the arrest, his party voted to back him. The vice chairman who read the statement was Leo Blundo.
He sued, and he lost
Carns did fight it in court, but not the way he said. In 2017 he sued Nye County, Sheriff Sharon Wehrly, and deputies McGill and Tom Klenczar in federal court, claiming false arrest and malicious prosecution.
On November 15, 2018, U.S. District Judge James C. Mahan threw the case out on summary judgment. The court found "officer McGill had probable cause to arrest Carns."
So a federal judge looked at the 2015 arrest and found it lawful. That matters, and it cuts against Carns.
It also leaves the real question untouched. If there was probable cause, why did the district attorney never file anything? Nobody has ever answered that. In April 2016, the editor of the Pahrump Valley Times wrote that he was still waiting on the DA's office to say where the case stood.
He is still waiting.
Then the county handed him the deputies
On January 19, 2022, the Nye County Commission reached Item 30: fill ten seats on the Peace Officer Advisory Review Board from eleven applicants.
The third name was William Carns.
Leo Blundo made the motion. Bruce Jabbour seconded. It passed 4-0. Term through January 2026.
Blundo was the same man who had defended Carns against the sheriff's office seven years earlier.
"Advisory" undersells the job. Under state law and county code, the board reviews citizen complaints against deputies and reviews the sheriff's own internal investigations. It recommends what happens to the deputy, and it can vote to raise the punishment, lower it, or clear the officer. Its hearings are closed to the public.
Three years after suing two Nye County deputies and losing, Carns was given a closed-door vote on whether deputies get punished.
Two fair points. The ten were approved in one motion, so nobody voted on Carns by name. And he is not on the current roster.
That same year he applied to be justice of the peace in Pahrump.
He did not get it. It is the same court where his five counts landed four years later.
The size of the pond
In 2021, Carns ran for a seat on the board of Valley Electric Association, the co-op that powers Pahrump.
He lost.
Two years earlier, a Nye County sheriff's captain named David Boruchowitz had arrested Valley Electric's chief executive, Angela Evans, and accused her of stealing power. He did not tell the judge who signed the warrant that he was helping lead a group trying to oust the co-op's board, or that prosecutors would later say he had a scheme to defraud that board of a seat on it for himself. Her case collapsed. She lost her job and left Nevada. Boruchowitz pleaded guilty in 2025 to wire fraud and violating her civil rights, and got probation and a fine. No prison.
Boruchowitz was also the sheriff's office voice on the 2015 Carns arrest. "We don't arrest people for misunderstandings," he told reporters then.
There is no evidence Carns knew any of that when he ran. That is not the point. The point is the size of the pond. In a county of about 57,000 people, the co-op board, the sheriff's office, the commission and the party are not four different worlds. They are the same few dozen people, changing chairs.
The other man with a microphone
By 2023, Carns was co-hosting a Facebook show, "Totally Unprepared, with Dave Champion and Bill Carns."
In 2012 a federal judge barred Champion from selling a scheme telling people they could opt out of income tax, calling his theories "wrong." In 2018 he ran for Nye County sheriff. On January 5, 2019, deputies arrested him for involuntary servitude and coercion after a woman who came to him for help with her husband's case accused him of sexual assault.
He posted bail and walked out. Nobody ever reported what happened to that case either.
Full circle
In January 2026 a new group launched in Pahrump, the Nye County Republican Club. DA Brian Kunzi came to its first lunch on January 28. Three days later, deputies arrested Carns.
On February 2 the county Republican Party published his booking sheet in a press release and said the club he helps run has "zero official standing" with the party. The chairman who signed it was Leo Blundo, the man who defended Carns in 2015 and moved to appoint him in 2022. Five weeks later Blundo was federally indicted over more than $500,000 in pandemic relief money. He pleaded not guilty.
And the sheriff's office that arrested Carns in 2026 is run by Sheriff Joe McGill, elected in 2022, the same deputy who arrested him in 2015 and whom Carns dragged through federal court over it.
Kunzi told the paper in February his office could not decide on charges yet: "Charging decisions cannot be made until this detail is fully downloaded and analyzed." On May 5 a senior deputy DA said the same thing: "We're still receiving pieces of evidence from the sheriff's office, as most recently as this morning."
Carns walked out uncharged, the way he did in 2015.
The shape of it
Set the new charges aside. Assume he is innocent of all five, which is what the law requires.
What is left is a shape that repeats. A man gets arrested. The case goes quiet. No prosecutor ever announces a decision, so there is no decision to argue with. And in the years between, the county keeps handing him things.
Three matters run through this story. Carns in 2015. Champion in 2019. Carns in 2026. They span three different district attorneys. In not one of them can an ordinary resident find out what the prosecutor decided, or whether anybody decided anything at all.
That is not an accident of one man's luck. That is how the machine is built.
Every fact here comes from a court record, a booking document, a government filing, a press release, or a published news story. Bill Carns has not been charged over his January 2026 arrest and is presumed innocent. Dave Champion was never reported to be charged after his 2019 arrest. Leo Blundo has pleaded not guilty. David Boruchowitz's guilty plea and sentence are federal record.
