Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos is dealing with backlash for a way he dealt with Nancy Guthrie’s abduction case.
Paul Huebl, a former Chicago police officer who now works as a non-public investigator, slammed Nanos in an interview with Radar On-line, the place he criticized the sheriff’s many missteps throughout the Guthrie case. These errors included not reporting that Nancy’s blood was discovered at her doorstep till 4 days after she went lacking, and reportedly permitting two reporters to entry the crime scene space, which has since change into “grossly contaminated.”
“These guys had been actually negligent, and it might make proof admission very tough at trial,” Huebl advised Radar On-line. “And so they had been extraordinarily sluggish to ask for out of doors assist from the FBI. That might have made an enormous distinction throughout the early hours of the case.”
When requested in regards to the alleged crime scene fumble on February 5, Nanos advised reporters, “I’ll let the courtroom fear about it.”
In response to Radar On-line, Nanos was additionally accused of not getting a search aircraft geared up with high-resolution thermal imaging cameras into the air for 3 hours on the day Nancy disappeared as a result of he’d clashed with the one deputy able to flying the machine weeks earlier and had allegedly reassigned the officer to avenue patrol. Nanos was additionally criticized for attending a College of Arizona basketball sport on February 7, the identical day Savannah Guthrie and her siblings, Annie and Camron, shared a video begging for his or her mother’s return.
“That’s, sadly, attribute of what’s occurred to this whole division throughout the board below Nanos’ management,” an nameless Pima County Sheriff’s deputy advised Radar On-line. “Probably the most veteran investigator in murder proper now has three years’ expertise in that division as a result of he retains bullying individuals out.”
Bob Krygier, a former Pima County Sheriff’s lieutenant with 25 years of SWAT expertise and one and a half years because the division’s full-time SWAT commander, additionally slammed the workplace to Radar On-line. “I’m pissed off and unhappy… This is a company during which I take satisfaction. I care about its repute. And I really hate what it has change into,” he mentioned.
Radar On-line’s sources additionally be aware that Nanos gained by a mere 481 votes throughout the 2024 sheriff’s election bid out of virtually half one million ballots. On the time, officers stood on avenue corners with indicators studying, “DEPUTIES DON’T WANT NANOS!”
A kind of officers, Sgt. Aaron Cross, a division union chief, has additionally sued the county claiming that Nanos suspended him for participating within the protest whereas sporting a civilian outfit that resembled his official uniform. Nanos was additionally accused of putting his election opponent, Heather Lappin, a lieutenant and a veteran of the sheriff’s division for 19 years, on pressured leaves in the previous few weeks of the election. Lappin has since left the division and accused Nanos of subjecting her to a marketing campaign of “torture,” based on Radar On-line.
A supply from the Pima County Sheriff’s workplace advised Radar On-line that the Guthrie case has been a “disaster” and a “nationwide embarrassment for the entire division because of Nanos’ management. “He’s making us look unhealthy,” the insider mentioned. “The rank and file hate this man’s guts, and now the entire nation sees why – and it’s a tragedy that it has to contain, by all accounts, a superb and respectable 84-year-old lady who occurs to have a well-known daughter. That’s the actual horror right here.”
