Officials have removed a wired device from the roof of the home of 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie after reportedly receiving a tip from one of her neighbors.
Nancy, who is the mother of TODAY show anchor Savannah Guthrie, has been missing for nearly a week and is believed to have been abducted from her home in Arizona.
Laura Gargano, the neighbor who provided the tip, says she encouraged law enforcement to check out the roof of the home because she thought that it appeared suspiciously clean in contrast to some of the other homes in the area.
“I did notice on an aerial shot that it looked like her roof had been recoated recently. When you recoat your roof, it gets dirty pretty quickly, and we’ve had a lot of rains the previous three weeks, so it would be normal for a roof to be a little dirty,” she said during an interview on Friday.
While she didn’t know if her tip would lead to any progress in the investigation, she felt it was worth noting.
“If you’re looking for surface people that visited, that’s just one thing to check,” she added. “It could be nothing, but I noticed it.”
After the tip, law enforcement members were later photographed walking around on the roof. The wired device that they took down is believed to be a camera, which could have been overlooked during the earlier stages of the investigation.
On Friday, retired NYPD Inspector Paul Mauro spoke out about the discovery of the device during an interview with Jesse Waters of Fox News.
“Apparently, on that roof, the agents recovered a new camera, a camera that apparently they hadn’t been aware of, and they took it into their custody. I don’t know anymore than that as to why it hadn’t been recovered, what it might see,” he said.
Officials have not yet publicly identified a suspect or person of interest in the case.