FBI and Arizona Sheriff clash over evidence handling in Nancy Guthrie case
The Pima County Sheriff's Department sent DNA evidence and gloves to a private Florida lab instead of the FBI's Quantico facility, prompting federal officials to express concern about case delays.
2 hrs ago
The FBI and Pima County Sheriff's Department are at odds over where physical evidence in the Nancy Guthrie disappearance case should be analyzed, according to law enforcement officials.
An unnamed law enforcement official told Reuters on Thursday that the Pima County Sheriff's Department sent evidence to a private DNA laboratory in Florida rather than to the FBI's national crime lab in Quantico, Virginia. The evidence includes a black glove found near Nancy Guthrie's Tucson home and DNA recovered from her house.
The official expressed concern about the decision. "It risks further slowing a case that grows more urgent by the minute," the official told Reuters. "It's clear the fastest path to answers is leveraging federal resources and technology."
Among the items sent to the Florida laboratory were two gloves discovered on a roadside approximately 1.5 miles from Nancy Guthrie's Tucson home, where she was abducted. The gloves resembled those worn by the alleged kidnapper captured on surveillance footage.
Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos disputed the characterization of events on Thursday. Speaking to NBC Tucson affiliate KVOA, Nanos said the report was "not even close to the truth" and stated that his agency is cooperating with the FBI.
Nanos explained his reasoning for the decision. "Actually, the FBI just wanted to send the one or two they found by the crime scene, closest to it — mile, mile and a half … I said 'No, why do that? Let's just send them all to where all the DNA exist, all the profiles and the markers exist.' They agreed, makes sense," Nanos told the outlet.
The sheriff, a second-term Democrat, emphasized that the FBI concurred with his approach of consolidating the evidence analysis at the private laboratory where existing DNA profiles and markers are already stored.