He’s choked back tears publicly while saying ‘we’re going to find her’ as he leads the massive operation to bring abducted Nancy Guthrie home alive.
But while his detectives continued to grind through the weekend, Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos took time off to watch a college basketball game – as revealed in an exclusive Daily Mail photo.
The sheriff was spotted at the basketball game on Saturday evening, at the same time that Savannah Guthrie shared a heartbreaking video with her siblings pleading for their mother’s return.
The Today Show host addressed her mother’s alleged abductors and said her family had ‘received your message’, and said she ‘will pay’ their ransom demands.
Nanos, whose face has been plastered across national media for the past six days, was seen in a khaki hoody top amid spectators watching number one ranked Arizona Wildcats defeat Oklahoma State 47-84 at the McKale Memorial Center in Tucson.
But the decision to take time out for the game has not gone down well with deputies swamped with chasing leads as the clock ticks unmercifully for the 84-year-old mother of NBC Today show co-host Savannah Guthrie.
‘It’s tone deaf while Nancy is still out there’, one senior source inside the sheriff’s department told the Daily Mail.
‘Everybody deserves, of course, their time off. It’s been a very stressful, hard, long week.
‘But given how hard detectives and search and rescue are working, including all the overtime they’re doing, it’s a poor decision and it doesn’t look good for the agency.
‘It just seems very odd given how emotional he was throughout the week during interviews, saying he believes she’s still alive and how desperate he is to find her,’
Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos took time off the ongoing search for Nancy Guthrie to enjoy a basketball game on Saturday evening, exclusive Daily Mail images show
Nancy Guthrie, 84, the mother of Today Show star Savannah Guthrie, vanished from her home in Tucson, Arizona on the night of January 31
The insider added: ‘Perhaps this game could be enjoyed from the comfort of his home. That would have been a better decision than being out in public.
‘The University of Arizona basketball team is ranked number one in the country. It’s a very big game and he’s now a public figure. He’s made a lot of appearances this week and people are going to recognize him.’
Of the comparison with the weekend of many of Nanos’s staff, the source said: ’Some of them have been working insane hours this week, so to watch your leader go to basketball is hard to take.’
Nanos has been under increasing fire for not coming up with any suspects nearly a week after Nancy was snatched from her $1million home in the affluent Catalina Foothills area of Tucson in the early hours Sunday.
His performances at press conferences have also come under scrutiny, particularly when he has been forced to walk back on some earlier statements about the kidnapping.
And the Daily Mail has revealed critical mistakes were made in the crucial first hours of the investigation, including being late to deploy a vital search-and-rescue aircraft.
Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos has come under mounting scrutiny for his handling of the search for the 84-year-old
Forensics teams were seen arriving at the home on Friday evening to seize new evidence
Investigators were seen scouring the roof of Nancy Guthrie’s home in Tucson, Arizona on Friday evening, and reportedly found a camera that had been missed in previous searches
A dark SUV was towed from the property on Friday
At one point in a press conference on Thursday he replied ‘my guesswork is as good as yours’ when asked about possible suspects.
When asked about possible evidence issues because crime scene tape at Nancy’s house was put up and taken down several times, he replied: ‘I’ll let the court worry about it. We follow the rules of law.’
But the biggest bungle has been to get the department’s high-tech Cessna aircraft into the air around Nancy’s home immediately after she was reported missing.
The two-seater plane, equipped with high-resolution thermal imaging cameras capable of scanning vast swaths of desert terrain, remained on the tarmac for roughly half a day, sources close to the sheriff’s department told the Daily Mail.
There was a staffing shortage that left the department without qualified pilots to fly the plane – a shortage people familiar with the situation blamed directly on Nanos.
Nancy was reported missing shortly after 12pm on Sunday. By 12.15pm police arrived at her home, but the aircraft known as Survey 1 was not in the air until around 5pm that evening.
Matt Heinz, a member of the Pima County Board of Supervisors, told the Daily Mail that failing to get the plane airborne may have cost investigators vital opportunities.
‘The initial few hours of any kind of search like this are absolutely crucial,’ Heinz said.
Six days into the search for Today Show host Savannah Guthrie’s mother Nancy, investigators returned to her Arizona home to seize new evidence amid hopes she is still alive
Sergeant Aaron Cross, president of the Pima County Sheriff’s Deputies Association, said that trained aviators who could have crewed the aircraft had been transferred out of the Air Operations Unit in recent weeks, creating the mess.
He described the plane as ‘the most valuable law enforcement asset in southern Arizona’.
One aviator switched was a 17-year veteran allegedly reassigned for disciplinary reasons the week before Nancy disappeared. Another had been moved out of the unit in November, 2025. Nanos did not fill the positions.
County GOP chairwoman Kathleen Winn said: ‘This left the department without crew to respond to the search due to short staffing.
‘If they had somebody who could fly that plane, they could have probably found her (Nancy) instantly if she was out in the desert.’
A helicopter was deployed, but it didn’t have the sophisticated sensors and thermal imagining technology aboard Survey 1.
Throughout the week the momentum of the criticism of Nanos has increased. The FBI appears to be playing a growing role and on Thursday announced a $50,000 reward for information leading to the recovery of Savannah’s mom, or the arrest and conviction of anyone involved in her disappearance.
