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More than a month after Today host Savannah Guthrie‘s mom Nancy Guthrie was reported missing, it seems that investigators are no closer to determining what happened, and now, the department responsible for that investigation is being hit with a major lawsuit. One inmate is suing Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos for over $1 million, accusing him of endangering his life at the county jail.
Inmate Christopher Michael Marx filed the lawsuit against the Pima County Sheriff’s Department earlier this month.
According to court documents obtained by the New York Post, an inmate named Christopher Michael Marx filed a lawsuit against Sheriff Nanos and the Pima County Sheriff’s Department on March 5, claiming that a sheriff deputy was not following proper health and safety protocols when working with both healthy inmates and one who had tested positive for COVID.
Christopher said that the deputy in question was working both the quarantined unit and the other unit (the one he was being held in) and was moving back and forth between both without sanitizing himself or taking other precautions to make sure that Christopher’s unit stayed healthy.
“This put my life in jeopardy with their action, constantly. I could have died,” he wrote in the filing.
The inmate claims that the sheriff violated Arizona’s State Constitution.
Christopher claimed the sheriff’s department broke the Arizona State Constitution by putting his health in danger and by subjecting him to “cruel and unusual punishment.”
Now, he’s asking for $1,350,000 that he said he will donate to homeless shelters, an apology from the sheriff, and that the health and safety protocols at Pima County Jail be changed to keep everyone safe.
Sheriff Nanos has been criticized over the way he’s been handling Nancy’s disappearance before.
This isn’t the first strike against Sheriff Nanos that has come out in the media recently. In February, the New York Post reported that insiders said he’d turned Nancy’s case into an ego trip for himself and was refusing to turn it over to the FBI, even though the agency was supposedly desperate to take over.
“The sheriff turned a serious investigation into a rolling spectacle, from questionable decisions to shifting narratives and a disastrous media cleanup tour that raised more questions than it answered,” a source told the outlet. “Leadership in moments like this requires discipline, not damage control.”
Aaron Cross, the president of the Pima County Deputies Organization who has sued Sheriff Nanos twice, also talked to the Post, criticizing the way the sheriff has handled the case (as well as the communications strategies around it). He even described Nanos as “angry and vindictive.”
“That’s who we experience inside the department,” he said. “The ‘aw shucks’ kind of persona that he portrays is kind of the character that he puts on.”
So far, the Sheriff’s Department doesn’t appear to have any more answers about what happened to Nancy than when they opened the investigation in February.
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