The bizarre way Nancy Guthrie’s alleged abductor carried his gun, along with the amateurish way he tried to cover up the Nest camera, all point to an inexperienced thug, a former FBI agent has claimed.
With the search for “Today” show host Savannah Guthrie’s 84-year-old mother entering its 10th day, the chilling pictures and videos released Thursday are the first major public breakthrough in the case.
And they offer offering potential clues about Nancy’s attacker.
The dumb gun
“That is a very non-conventional way to carry a firearm. Very non-conventional,” former agent Mark Harrigan told The Post, referring to the picture appearing to show the suspect with the gun holstered at the front.
“He has it in the open, which is unusual, because normally you would want it concealed when you’re going to do a crime, so you’re not calling attention to yourself with an exposed firearm,” he said.
“That’s potentially somebody that’s not normally armed or carrying a firearm around in public. Normally, you’d have it on the hip,” said Harrigan, formerly the chief of the FBI’s Firearms Training Program.
“You don’t carry it on your hip bone because it’s uncomfortable. He may have had it concealed in his backpack and decided then to put it on his waist when he got close to the door,” he added.
Camera fail
The suspect’s actions on camera also point to a possibly unsophisticated operation, Harrigan explained.
“You see the suspect come up to the door and he uses his hand to cover the camera, but only sort of,” he said.
The timeline of the disappearance of Savannah Guthrie’s mom:
“He balls his fist up, and then you see him walk back out of the vestibule there. It appears he’s looking for something to conceal the camera. He reaches down and picks up some vegetation in an attempt to cover the camera,” he added.
“A sophisticated person would have brought something from the very beginning. Either a hammer or something to remove the camera, or spray paint,” Harrigan said.
The footage was still retrievable
The major question now, for Harrigan, is why it took authorities so long to obtain the video, a week and a half after she vanished from her house in Tucson.
Sharing the pictures and video on Tuesday, FBI Director Kash Patel said they had been “recovered from residual data located in backend systems” on the security camera.
Follow The Post’s live updates on Savannah Guthrie’s missing mom
That could be the result of the video being lost, corrupted, or inaccessible, Patel added, a detail which Harrigan felt was important.
“If they use the word corrupted, to me, it sounds like something in the data transmission went bad and they had to go in and do some advanced technical work to try to retrieve those files,” he said.
“They probably needed a specialized program to restore the data into a viewable video,” Harrigan said.
“Normally, if you go in front of the camera, you can interrupt the video by destroying, removing, or covering it, but you can’t do anything to corrupt data that I am aware of when you’re standing in front of the camera,” Harrigan added.
Authorities said that Nancy Guthrie didn’t pay for the Nest subscription that saved the footage from her camera.
Instead, the footage was only retained for a few hours before it was erased. Engineers at Google — Nest’s owner — would likely have had to dig through deleted and corrupted files to piece together the footage.