An Arizona couple say they are living a real-life nightmare and have been “scared numb” after online would-be sleuths wrongly claimed the husband was being eyed as a suspect in Nancy Guthrie’s kidnapping.
Fifth-grade teacher Dominic Evans, 48, revealed his family have been hunkering down in their Tucson home without lights on and are in constant fear of being followed ever since his name became linked to the mysterious Guthrie case early on, the New York Times reported.
“He’s going through hell and it is horrible,” Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos said of the lies being pedaled about the married father of three.
“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.”
Evans said the false accusations exploded online after amateur investigators realized he played in a band with Guthrie’s son-in-law, Tommaso Cioni, who was the last person to see the grandmother alive before she vanished on Feb. 1. Guthrie’s entire family has since been cleared by authorities.
The true-crime obsessives also thought Evans resembled the masked man with a backpack and a gun holster caught tampering with Guthrie’s doorbell camera in footage released by authorities in the days after her disappearance.
And the amateur sleuths zeroed in on Evans’ prior arrest for drunkenly stealing a calculator from a bar way back in 1999 to pedal the theory that he was somehow involved in the case.
From there, the teacher’s address was quickly blasted out online and dozens of people started swarming his home overnight as they scrambled to try to pin the abduction of Savannah Guthrie’s mom on him.
Evans and his wife, Andrea, who is a principal in a neighboring school district, told their teen son not to come home and didn’t feel safe collecting their two youngest boys from their grandparents’ home in case someone followed them.
“It was all night looking through the window, trying to not let any light out of our home,” Andrea said, adding she has been left “scared numb” by the entire ordeal.
As the speculation ramped up, Evans was forced to take time off work.
