A 6-year-old boy in Arizona spent his first night away from his parents this month. Not because he was at a sleepover, or away at a camp. It was because people had descended on his parents’ suburban Tucson street, thinking that his father might be the man who had abducted Nancy Guthrie.
The boy’s father, Dominic Evans, a 48-year-old elementary-school teacher, plays drums in a band with one of Ms. Guthrie’s sons-in-law. For some people, that, coupled with Mr. Evans’s 1999 arrest for drunkenly swiping a calculator and watch while out at a bar, was enough.
He became their prime suspect.
The accusations were levied online, but they have become a real-life nightmare for Mr. Evans and his wife. They hid in their bedroom with the lights off that night, too frightened to pick up their son from his grandmother’s house, for fear of being followed. Days later, another swarm of journalists, livestreamers and gawkers photographed the family’s home and knocked on their neighbors’ doors.
The couple, who met years ago in the copy room of the school where they worked, have tried to live a private life in a quiet neighborhood where they are raising three boys. Instead, they have become the latest victims of America’s internet-enabled fascination with crime — and amateur efforts to solve the disappearance of Ms. Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of the television host Savannah Guthrie.
It doesn’t matter that Mr. Evans spoke to investigators two weeks ago, for roughly 40 minutes, and hasn’t heard from them since. On social media, there are people who are sure the ski-masked man at Ms. Guthrie’s doorstep in the early hours of Feb. 1 was Mr. Evans — it’s in the eyes, they say.
Mr. Evans and his wife, Andrea, spoke publicly for the first time in an interview with The New York Times in Tucson this week. Both were often near tears as they described a blur of disturbing events.
“I feel like someone’s taken my name,” Mr. Evans said. But for what reasons? “I don’t know — monetary, clickbait, to be relevant, entertainment — but there are innocent people that get hurt.”
Sheriff Chris Nanos of Pima County, Ariz., who is leading the investigation with the F.B.I., said in an interview that he was frustrated by many of the accusations. He said he did not want to publicly rule out anyone beyond Ms. Guthrie’s relatives and their spouses, whom he cleared last week. But, he said, he felt for Mr. Evans.
“He’s going through hell, and it is horrible,” Sheriff Nanos said. “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.”
“I wish I could jump out and defend every single one of them that’s been falsely accused,” he added.
Mr. Evans’s connection to the Guthrie family began in 2007, when he joined a rock band called Early Black with Tommaso Cioni after responding to a Craigslist ad, and the two started jamming regularly, with a guitarist. At some point, Mr. Cioni, the bassist, mentioned that he was married to the older sister of Savannah Guthrie, the “Today” show host. Mr. Evans said he met Nancy Guthrie only once, in 2011, when he brought his oldest son to hunt for Easter eggs at her home.
Mr. Evans recalls vividly what he was doing when he learned that something had happened to her. It was the night of Feb. 1, and he and his wife were putting their two younger sons to bed in separate rooms, each lying with one son until he fell asleep.
As Ms. Evans scrolled through Instagram from her son’s bed, she saw that Ms. Guthrie had been reported missing. She texted her husband in the other room, and he responded with disbelief.
Mr. Evans sent a message to Mr. Cioni, telling him that he was there to support him. But within days, the storm of accusations came for them both.
In the first days after Ms. Guthrie was abducted, online suspicion turned to Mr. Cioni, in large part because of a podcast host who had claimed that he was a suspect.
Then, people zeroed in on Mr. Evans, noting a conviction for drunken driving and the 1999 bar incident, for which he served a year and a half on probation. He graduated from the University of Arizona a few years later and has been teaching ever since.
On Feb. 10, the day that investigators released footage from Ms. Guthrie’s doorbell camera, people began to speculate whether the man pictured wearing a mask and carrying a pistol was Mr. Evans, posting side-by-side images of the two and analyzing their eyes, brows and lashes.
Mr. Evans and his wife arrived home later that day and noticed more cars than usual at a nearby park. Within minutes of walking inside, many of those cars pulled up to their street. Mr. Evans remembers seeing young people sitting in the back of a truck, as if their home was a macabre attraction.
The couple told their oldest son, a teenager, not to come home, and they felt they could not retrieve their youngest sons from their grandmother’s house because some of the cars remained on their street until the early morning.
“It was all night looking through the window, trying to not let any light out of our home,” said Ms. Evans, 39, a principal in a neighboring school district. She said she had been “scared numb” by it all.
Days later, on Friday the 13th, Mr. Evans asked his school’s principal to hold a brief staff meeting, where Mr. Evans addressed the speculation with other teachers and said he would be taking a few days off. That week, he also met with investigators from the F.B.I. and the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, who he said had asked about his band, his friendship with Mr. Cioni, and his whereabouts on the night Ms. Guthrie was taken — at home with his family, he told them.
But at about 5 p.m. on Feb. 13, several journalists and livestreamers reported that a SWAT vehicle had left the sheriff’s department headquarters. That sent a flood of people back to the couple’s neighborhood, anticipating that Mr. Evans might be the target. Their address was posted online.
“This one felt really, really, really scary, because it was like everyone was waiting for someone to come to our house,” Ms. Evans said.
Mr. Evans’s first thought was that he had been “swatted” by someone wishing him harm. They told their 6-year-old to stay away from the window and to keep quiet. As it turned out, the police operation was actually targeting a home 30 minutes away, where investigators questioned and released someone.
As of Tuesday, the abduction of Ms. Guthrie remained a mystery. Savannah Guthrie, the youngest of Ms. Guthrie’s three children, offered a $1 million reward for information that leads investigators to her mother, saying that the family knows she may be dead but is holding out hope.
In recent days, the accusatory onslaught against Mr. Evans has eased, and he has been able to go back to teaching. He said he had gotten support from colleagues and the parents of his fifth graders, who he had feared might believe speculation posted online.
But the lasting effects are clear. The other day, Mr. Evans worried that a man was following him at a department store. Ms. Evans can’t help pulling out her phone and searching her husband’s name — she wants to know in advance if people might mob their neighborhood.
“None of this real, but there’s so much of it,” Ms. Evans said of the speculation. “How can anyone decipher or catch all of it?”
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs reports for The Times on national stories across the United States with a focus on criminal justice.
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