Carson man arraigned on child Internet sex charge

SACRAMENTO - A 58-year-old Carson City man was arraigned Wednesday in federal court on charges of attempting to have sex with a minor he thought lived in South Lake Tahoe.

Timothy Craig Randall, a retired Nevada corrections officer, pleaded not guilty to charges of attempting to commit lewd acts with a girl and traveling in interstate commerce with the intent to engage in illicit sexual conduct with a girl.

Prosecutors said Randall used the Internet and the telephone to contact a person he thought was a 13-year-old South Lake Tahoe girl and attempted to persuade her to have sex. Instead, he was communicating with an undercover officer, said Mary Wenger, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney's office.

Randall also traveled to South Lake Tahoe from Nevada in an attempt to have sex with the girl, according to the charges.

He was arrested in the parking lot next to Rite Aid, believing he was picking up the eighth-grade girl after school at South Tahoe Middle School.

Randall had a motel room and was talking on the cell phone to the "girl" in a Ford Focus when he was confronted by authorities.

Randall and the girl, a decoy from Perverted Justice, a watch dog group devoted to identifying sexual predators, talked for six months online before his arrest near the end of April, authorities stated.

They talked in three different Internet chat rooms but met in a Yahoo! Northern Nevada chat room, authorities said.

He initially faced state charges filed by the El Dorado County District Attorney's office, but those charges were dropped pending the outcome of the federal case.

Randall fled after the state charges were filed in El Dorado County and later was arrested in South Dakota, prosecutors said.

He faces up to 30 years in prison on each of the charges if convicted. U.S. Magistrate Judge Gregory Hollows ordered him held without bail.

• Tahoe Daily Tribune staff writer William Ferchland contributed to this report