A 5th grade teacher accused online of being a potential suspect in the Nancy Guthrie investigation is speaking out after his house was swarmed by amateur sleuths.
Dominic Evans, 48, told The New York Times in an interview on Wednesday, February 25, that his home in Tucson, Arizona, was targeted after the FBI released surveillance camera images on February 10 of a masked man outside of Nancy’s home north of Tucson. The armed individual appeared to tamper with Nancy’s doorbell camera in pictures and footage recovered by the FBI.
Dominic told the outlet that he has only met Nancy, 84, once, in 2011, and was falsely accused, in part, because he is in a band with Tommaso Cioni, Nancy’s son-in-law and Today show cohost Savannah Guthrie’s brother-in-law. (Tommaso is married to Savannah’s sister, Annie.)
“I feel like someone’s taken my name,” Dominic said. “I don’t know [for what reason] — monetary, clickbait, to be relevant, entertainment — but there are innocent people that get hurt.”
Dominic and his wife, Andrea, told the outlet that after the FBI images were released, his facial features were compared to the masked person in the surveillance footage. People online also brought up a past drunk-driving conviction and an arrest for a 1999 bar theft as further proof of his involvement.
The couple said they were too scared to pick up their two youngest children from their grandmother’s house on the day the photos were released because of the sheer number of people that had congregated outside of their home.
“It was all night looking through the window, trying to not let any light out of our home,” Andrea said, noting that she was “scared numb” by it all.
Days later, after local police and the FBI coordinated a February 13 home search and traffic stop in Tucson, more people swarmed to the Evans’ home, they said. (The police detained and later released four people in connection with a search warrant executed on February 13.)
“This one felt really, really, really scary, because it was like everyone was waiting for someone to come to our house,” Andrea said.
Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos, who is leading the search for Nancy with the FBI, told the New York Times that he felt sorry for Dominic. The teacher spoke only once to investigators and had not heard from them since, the Times reported.
“He’s going through hell, and it is horrible,” Nanos said. “And I don’t know what to tell him except he probably should be speaking with some attorneys and sue some of these people for libel.”
“I wish I could jump out and defend every single one of them that’s been falsely accused,” Nanos added.
The Pima County Sheriff’s Department has not publicly ruled out anyone in its investigation with the exception of Nancy’s immediate family, including her son-in-law, who himself faced scrutiny after an unverified report that he was a person of interest early on in the investigation.
“To be clear … the Guthrie family — to include all siblings and spouses — have been cleared as possible suspects in this case. The family has been nothing but cooperative and gracious and are victims in this case,” Nanos said in a statement on February 16.
Nanos added, “To suggest otherwise is not only wrong, it is cruel. The Guthrie family are victims, plain and simple.”
On Tuesday, February 24, Savannah and her siblings increased a monetary reward for Nancy’s return to $1 million as the search for the Guthrie matriarch nears the end of its fourth week.
