Former Hot Springs Teacher Dropped Thumb Drive Of Child Sexual Abuse Material In Front Of Parole Officers, Affidavit Says; He Now Faces 100 Counts

A former Hot Springs teacher already imprisoned once for child pornography dropped a USB thumb drive in front of parole officers during a compliance check at his home last year and admitted it held child sexual abuse material, according to a sheriff’s affidavit filed this week in Garland County Circuit Court.

Zachary Thomas Nehus, 54, was charged Monday with 100 counts of pandering or possessing a visual or print medium depicting sexually explicit conduct involving a child, a Class C felony. Prosecuting Attorney Michelle Lawrence also charged him as a habitual offender with four or more prior felony convictions, which the filing says raises the range on each count to three to 30 years in prison.

Nehus is the husband of former Hot Springs School District Superintendent Stephanie Nehus, who was placed on leave after his April 2025 arrest and reached a separation agreement with the district the next month, KARK reported.

The affidavit, signed Oct. 2 by Garland County sheriff’s Investigator Jennifer Barrera, is the first public account of what happened at 179 Bledsoe Circle on April 29, 2025. Officers with Arkansas Community Correction’s parole and probation division were conducting a parole compliance check at the house. Nehus was on active parole and had a search waiver on file, the affidavit says.

“During the contact, officers observed Nehus drop a USB thumb drive onto the ground,” Barrera wrote. “When questioned about the device, Nehus admitted it contained Child Sexual Abuse Material.”

Sheriff’s deputies obtained a search warrant for the house and seized several digital storage devices, including a 128-gigabyte microSD card and 256-gigabyte and 2-gigabyte SanDisk drives, according to the affidavit. Additional warrants authorized forensic examinations, and the devices went to Sgt. Russ Rhodes of the Arkansas State Police Criminal Investigation Division.

Rhodes identified about 1,500 files of suspected child sexual abuse material on the seized media, the affidavit says. Several of the videos ended with recordings of a device’s control-center screen showing it had been connected to a wireless network named “NehusFamily,” and one of the drives also held personal photographs of the Nehus family.

On June 26, 2025, Rhodes drove to Bledsoe Circle and detected the password-protected “NehusFamily” network broadcasting from the area, according to the affidavit.

At the time of the arrest, the sheriff’s office said only that investigators had “discovered enough evidence of crimes related to the aforementioned offense to place Mr. Nehus under arrest for violating the terms and conditions of his parole,” KATV reported. The station described Nehus as a Level 2 sex offender who had taught at St. John’s Catholic School.

The new affidavit lists his address as the Arkansas Department of Corrections. No court date has been set, and the docket shows no first appearance yet.

The information filed Monday afternoon listed the offense date as April 29, 2026. Prosecutors filed an amended information Tuesday morning that corrected the year to 2025 and is otherwise identical.

Court records show the new case closely tracks the one that sent Nehus to prison a decade ago. Garland County deputies searched his home on Sept. 25, 2014, and seized a desktop computer, three iPads, two iPhones, a camcorder, three hard drives and several flash drives, according to an inventory later filed in that case. Then-Prosecuting Attorney Terri Harris charged him in February 2015 with 30 counts of distributing, possessing or viewing matter depicting sexually explicit conduct involving a child. He was released on a $75,000 cash bond.

Nehus pleaded no contest to 10 of the counts in March 2016, and the state dropped the other 20 under a plea agreement. A jury set his punishment after a two-day sentencing hearing. Circuit Judge John Homer Wright’s sentencing order imposed three years on each of eight counts and ran them consecutively, 24 years in all, with 10-year suspended sentences on the remaining two counts. The court ordered the $75,000 bond returned to his wife.

In 2018, his attorneys, Q. Byrum Hurst and Justin Hurst, asked the court to run the sentences concurrently instead. They argued the jury had wanted the minimum, that Nehus was “a first offender” with “an exemplary record,” and that a man who “commits an offense with no violence in the complete privacy of his own home should not receive a sentence which is often greater than sentences for people who have had direct sexual contact with minors.” The court denied the petition that July, ruling it no longer had jurisdiction to change the sentence.

Less than three months before the parole check, the state asked to destroy the evidence from the 2014 search. In a Feb. 3, 2025, petition filed on Lawrence’s behalf, Assistant Attorney General Alexa Vetsch wrote that the items were “not the subject of any pending court case or appeal” and asked that the digital devices be wiped and everything else destroyed. The inventory in that petition includes, alongside the computers and drives, a 10-milliliter vial of succinylcholine chloride, a paralytic drug sold under the brand name Quelicin, seized the same day as the electronics. At the 2016 trial, Nehus’ lawyers had won an order barring prosecutors from mentioning that “a medication” was found in the search. Circuit Judge Ralph Ohm granted the destruction request Feb. 4, 2025.

Nehus has not entered a plea to the new charges. The case is 26CR-26-843 in Garland County Circuit Court.