Guilty until proven innocent

Hard to believe it's been over a month now since Nancy Guthrie went missing. Hard to believe they haven't found something: Nancy (dead or alive), the kidnappers. 

I cannot begin to imagine what this poor woman is going through/went through. Nancy Guthrie is/was eight years older than I am, and she sure looks like she could be someone I know. Part of the alumni commitee I'm a member of. A fellow volunteer. A neighbor. Someone cruising the same shelves at the library looking for a bunch of good reads. A nice, pleasant "older lady" who looks like she doesn't have a mean bone in her body.

I cannot begin to imagine what her poor family is going through. There's the act of the kidnapping. But even worse is the not knowing. It's god-awful to sit through a death watch. It's god-awful to lose someone you love. But not knowing what your loved one is enduring/has endured? Not knowing if they're alive or dead? Not knowing if you'll ever know? Unimaginable.

It's also unimaginable to be an innocent bystander, someone who had less than zero to do with this heinous crime, yet find yourself a prime suspect, plastered all over social media and having civilian vigilante crime-stoppers stalking you (and your family) online and up close and personal.

As has happened to Dominic Evans, a Tucson grade-school teacher who had the ill luck to have been the drummer for Early Black, a band for which Nancy Guthrie's son in law Tommaso Cioni is the bassist. Early on, Cioni was named (by someone, somewhere) as the prime suspect in Guthrie's disappearance. ("The authorities" - and they've been none too authoritative here - have since announce that all the family members, including Cioni, have been cleared.)

Evans, who is 48, also became a prime target because of his criminal past. I.e., Internet sleuthers, in their zest to solve a crime, unearthed the fact that 27 years ago, when Evans was 21, he was arrested "for drunkenly swiping a calculator and watch while out at a bar." Crime of the century, that. 

Anyway, as things do, speculation about Evans' culpability went viral.

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. (Source: NY Times)

When the speculation hit the fan, the Evans' asked their parents to keep their two youngest overnight. They told their teenage son not to come home. Evans had spoken with investigators (legit ones) and, while he hasn't yet been cleared, they haven't reached out to him in the weeks following the first interview. Looks to me like no one suspects Evans of anything. 

Yet when the doorbell camera pictures of the ski-masked man on Nancy Guthrie's doorstep were released, online "crime solvers" decided that yep, the guy was Evans. 

The lives of Evans, his wife, his children have been turned upside down. No, it's not the same degree as what the Guthrie family's experiencing, but it ain't nothing, either. 

“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.”

Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos (who, regretably, has come across as something of a Barney Fife throughout the investigation) recently said that, while no one other than Guthrie's family (inclding Tommaso Cioni) has been ruled out as a suspect, he feels bad for Dominic 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.

Good luck to Evans if he does decide to sue. I'm sure the defense will be some combination of First Amendment, we were just thinking out loud, we meant no harm, we were just trying to help. Not to mention that most of the social media Sherlocks probably don't have two nickels to rub together. 

The "accusatory onslaught against" Evans has been dying down, and life is getting back to the new normal.

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 is real, but there’s so much of it,” Ms. Evans said of the speculation. “How can anyone decipher or catch all of it?”

Problem is, you can't.

I feel plenty bad for Nancy Guthrie, and for her family. They're going through hell. But I'm also feeling plenty bad for Dominic Evans and his family, collateral damage in the hunt for Nancy Guthrie and her abductor(s). And in the eyes and limited little minds of the nothing-better-to-do-brigade of amateur crime solvers, guilty until proven innocent.

Look, I understand just how entertaining it is to poke around the web googling "stuff." Way back in 2013, when the Boston Marathon Bombing occurred, I spent hours haunting the web. And when they released the names of the bombing brothers, I found info on Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev - where he was a student, what he was studying - before it hit any of the news sites. 

But finding "stuff" out is one thing, keyboard and phone vid rampaging around accusing innocent people of crimes they didn't commit is quite another. Get a life, folks. And if you can't get a life, why not STFU rather than keep hurting the lives of others.

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Image Source: Screen Daily