A tearful Savannah Guthrie has given her first interview since the abduction of her mother.
NBC‘s Today show host appeared on her own program, where she opened up to colleague Hoda Kotb about the “agony” of searching for her mom, Nancy, who is thought to have been abducted from her home in Arizona on February 1.
Today released a preview of the interview on Wednesday, ahead of its full release throughout the week.
The 84-year-old was last seen shortly before 10 p.m. the day before, with the alarm raised when she failed to show up to virtual church at a friend’s house. While her family has pleaded countless times with any would-be abductors, it is the first time the long-time Today show host has sat down for a formal interview.
“Someone needs to do the right thing,” she said in the preview, voice strained and fighting tears. “We are in agony. We are in agony. It is unbearable. And to think of what she went through.”
She then revealed how she had been suffering since her mom vanished.
“I wake up every night in the middle of the night, every night,” she told Kotb. “And in the darkness, I imagine her terror. And it is unthinkable, but those thoughts demand to be thought. And I will not hide my face. But she needs to come home now.”
Previously, Guthrie and her siblings had thanked the general public for “the prayers for our beloved mom,” via an Instagram video. “We feel them, and we continue to believe that she feels them, too.”
They have offered a $1 million reward for her return, while the FBI has offered $50,000 to anyone with information on her whereabouts.
In a statement to NBC’s Tucson affiliate this week, the Guthrie family pleaded with the local community to rack their brains.
“It’s possible a member of this community has information that they do not even realize is significant,” they said. “We hope people search their memories, especially around the key timelines of January 31 and the early morning hours of February 1, as well as the late evening of January 11.”
It comes after Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos flagged a key date in the investigation to KOLD.
“We do believe that something occurred on January 11, and that’s with the FBI’s analysis of the equipment and digital stuff they’ve done,” he said. That date lines up with when a neighbor told cops they had seen a suspicious man lurking in the neighborhood.”
“He was kind of looking around, and he just didn’t fit,” her neighbor Aldine Meister told NewsNation.
A huge investigation has been launched across both federal and state levels, and has led to the release of a chilling image of a masked man coming to Nancy Guthrie’s door. Cops have said the man is a suspect and said that her blood had been found on her porch at her home.
