Eleven days into the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie and the Pima County Sheriff's Department is being questioned from every direction — by its own deputies' union, by county supervisors, and by the Guthrie family itself. Criminal defense attorney and former felony prosecutor Eric Faddis examines the legal damage created by a cascade of documented investigative decisions.

The crime scene was released prematurely. Sheriff Nanos admitted it publicly. His department returned to the home multiple times after the initial release to collect additional evidence — each re-entry creating chain of custody problems that Faddis says any defense attorney would seize on at trial. Evidence recovered after a scene is released and potentially accessed by civilians carries a contamination question mark that never fully disappears.

The department's thermal imaging aircraft, equipped to detect body heat across the Arizona desert, was grounded for five hours after Nancy was reported missing. The pilot had been reassigned to street patrol by the sheriff months earlier over a personal dispute. The union opposed the move. For an eighty-four-year-old woman potentially in the desert, that five-hour gap is not administrative — it's potentially catastrophic. Faddis explains the legal standard for negligence and whether this specific delay, tied to a specific decision by a specific official, could meet that threshold.

The Nest doorbell footage that authorities spent ten days calling permanently unrecoverable was ultimately produced by the FBI from backend server data. Faddis walks through how a defense team would frame that ten-day blind spot — and what it means for every investigative choice made while the department believed its best evidence was gone.

The sheriff told NBC News that Nancy was "taken from her bed" and retracted it the next day. Faddis addresses both the legal risks of inaccurate public statements by the lead investigator and what the family's decision to go around the department tells him about the state of this investigation.

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