By admin 
TUCSON, AZ (AZFamily/AP) — The Pima County Sheriff’s Department (PCSD) confirmed Thursday that more evidence in the Nancy Guthrie case did not lead anywhere, as the agency may face legal action.
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Investigators said that testing on hair found at the 84-year-old’s Catalina Foothills home, north of Tucson, did not point to a suspect. Detectives did not elaborate on where the hair was found or whether it belonged to a man or a woman.
The dead end comes as an attorney for Carlos Palazuelos, the man detained days after Guthrie went missing, and two family members filed on Monday a notice of claim, a precursor to a lawsuit, against PCSD.
Palazuelos was pulled over Feb. 10 in Rio Rico, about 60 miles south of Tucson. The court paperwork said he was held “without probable cause” for about seven to eight hours.
“Carlos’ arrest was made in a public fashion that was intended to damage Carlos’ reputation and subject him to humiliation and suspicion by implicating Carlos in the kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie,” the notice of claim said.
The court paperwork said while Palazuelos was being held, men in military gear pointed guns at a family member named Daniel Maddox, removed him from the home and “ransacked” the home, “causing significant property damage” that included breaking the front door and door frame and damaging paint, ceiling tiles and the attic entrance.
Maddox was also reportedly forced to the ground and handcuffed.
The notice of claim said the detainment and home search were based on “false and baseless evidence.”
“Whatever this purported evidence was that the sheriff’s department used to obtain the search warrant, it’s wrong. It’s not good evidence,” Jesse Showalter, attorney for the family, said.
The court paperwork said Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos and the department have refused to clear Palazuelos’ name or to say publicly that he is not involved in the Guthrie case, forcing him to live under a cloud of suspicion.
“(I’m calling on Sheriff Nanos) to clear Carlos’s name and to acknowledge that he had no involvement whatsoever in the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie and that this was an error,” Showalter said.
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The family plans to seek $2.5 million for Palazuelos, $500,000 for Maddox, and $250,000 for Josefina Maddox, the owner of the house, for a total of $3.25 million.
The department has 60 days to respond.
Palazuelos said in February that the FBI told him he was questioned because a tip was called in saying he looked similar to the suspect seen in surveillance camera footage taken outside Guthrie’s home.
Nanos said there were more factors leading to Palazuelos’s detainment than just a tip, but he could not expand on them. He has previously said no one, including Palazuelos, has been ruled out as part of the investigation.
“There’s no doubt at this point that it was a wrongful search and a wrongful arrest,” Showalter said.
Authorities believe Nancy Guthrie was kidnapped, abducted or otherwise taken against her will on Feb. 1. They found blood near the front doorstep of her home just outside Tucson, and the FBI later released surveillance videos showing a masked man on the porch that night.
Volunteers and search teams scoured the nearby desert terrain filled with cacti, bushes and boulders in the weeks after she vanished. A volunteer group recently searched for her body near the Arizona-Mexico border. Authorities have not said how many purported ransom demands were made after Guthrie’s disappearance, though three news organizations reported receiving such notes and turned them over to investigators.
The FBI has discounted some of the ransom notes as nothing more than extortion attempts but said it’s still evaluating others that might be legitimate. The federal agency hasn’t specified which ransom notes might be genuine.
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