Does a viral video show security camera footage recovered by police that shows the exact moment Savannah Guthrie's mother, Nancy, disappeared? No, that's not true: The Pima County Sheriff, whose office is investigating the kidnapping, has not released security camera footage collected by investigators. Multiple visual artifacts show that it's likely AI-generated or AI-altered video from a different circumstance, mis-labelled to gain social media engagement because of Savannah Guthrie's fame.
The video appeared in multiple posts, including this Feb. 3, 2026 Facebook post (archived here) published on the Celeb News Today page under the title "RECOVERED. It opened:
Police have recovered 57 seconds of security camera footage from a neighbor's house, showing the exact moment Savannah Guthrie's mother disappeared, at the 25-second mark... Watch the video below.."
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of post at facebook.com/photo/?fbid=122161059572840851&set=a.122096839286840851.)
The Pima County Sheriff's Department reports developments on the case via its X account (archived here). Lead Stories manually searched the account, finding the Sheriff's Department has not released door-cam or other security footage of Camino Escalante, the street on which Nancy Guthrie lives.
Using Google Street View, Lead Stories determined Camino Escalante does not have the kind of painted dividing lines shown in the fake video. Police have at various points in the investigation closed off the street to give forensics experts room to work on the narrow road, which has no sidewalks, no painted parking spaces and no center line. Lead Stories "drove" the closed portion, from Cerrada Nopal to East Camino El Ganado on Google Maps. Here's a representative image of what it looks like in front of the address listed in public records as Guthrie's home.
Drone view:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of Google Maps aerial view of N. Camino Escalante.)
Street view (captured by Google's car-top cameras):
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of Google Maps aerial view of N. Camino Escalante.)
Notes on Google Maps indicate this image was captured in 2011, but the details generally match recent news footage published by Arizona outlets, including this live Fox News drone footage (archived here) of investigators at work on Feb. 8. It confirms North Camino Escalante still has no sidewalks, painted parking spaces or center line.
"Police tape" betrays AI origin of video:
As is often the case with AI-generated video, background signs and writings are a nonsensical jumble of misspellings and malformed letters not appearing in any known alphabet. In this case, the police tape in the video is the giveaway. Police tape repeats the same warning over and over. Not only does this AI-generated tape include multiple warnings, it misspells almost every word, reading: "POICE CIOT CROSS POLIE NOSS":
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of video on Facebook account Celeb News Today.)
Viet Spam Factory Product
By using keywords from the post, Lead Stories located multiple versions of the claim about a 57-second video in Facebook search (archived here).
Pages provided no transparency data about the home countries of their managers. But the Facebook post that is the subject of this fact check sends users to Nongnhat.com, a website primarily in Vietnamese, where Vietnamese text above the story about the fake police security video could indicate the page-builder's native language.
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of Guthrie story as it appears on nongnhat.com.)
The main nonnhat.com page looks like this:
Google Image search, which translates text found on or in images, identifies the text as Vietnamese and translated it as follows:
Commitment to innovation and sustainability
Études is a pioneering company that seamlessly integrates creativity and functionality to redefine excellence in architecture.
About us
A Vietnam connection is significant, since fact-checkers, including Lead Stories, have identified a major source of AI-generated false stories coming from a single operation based in that Southeast Asian country. You can see recent reporting and fact checks mentioning that country here.
