A pair of black gloves discovered near the home of Nancy Guthrie — the 84-year-old Arizona woman who has now been missing for 11 days — is being tested for DNA, the Pima County Sheriff's Department confirmed Wednesday.

According to KGNS TV, the find came as federal agents fanned out across multiple roadways in the Catalina Foothills area, escalating a search that has drawn national attention and a response from the White House.

The sheriff's department did not say what kind of gloves they are. What investigators do know is that Guthrie was last seen alive on January 31, that an armed individual was captured on surveillance footage outside her home that morning, and that someone removed the recording device from her residence.

That last detail alone should sharpen the focus of anyone following this case.

The search intensifies

The FBI confirmed that its agents are conducting an extensive search along multiple roadways in the Catalina Foothills, and residents across Pima County were told to expect increased law enforcement activity. Several hundred detectives and agents are currently assigned to the case — a massive mobilization for a single missing person investigation, and one that signals how seriously authorities are treating the circumstances.

On Tuesday, the FBI and the Pima County Sheriff's Department released surveillance images and video showing the armed individual outside Guthrie's home the morning she disappeared. The images were not easy to recover. The FBI said investigators worked with private sector partners to retrieve footage that had been "lost, corrupted or inaccessible due to a variety of factors, including the removal of the recording device." The video images were ultimately recovered from residual data located in backend systems.

Someone didn't just take Nancy Guthrie. Someone tried to erase the evidence of it.

A detention, a release, and more questions

Tuesday evening, the Pima County Sheriff's Department conducted what it called a "court-authorized search" of a location in Rio Rico. A man, Carlos Palazuelos, was detained in connection with the disappearance. He was later released. Palazuelos has said he doesn't know why it happened and that he simply wants to clear his name.

No charges have been filed. No arrest has been made. Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos told a local reporter that there have been no signs of Nancy Guthrie.

Eleven days. No signs. An armed figure on camera. A stolen recording device. And now a pair of black gloves sitting in a forensics lab.

A community watching

The Pima County Sheriff's Department has received nearly 18,000 calls on the case since February 1, with more than 4,000 coming in the last 24 hours alone. That volume speaks to something beyond routine concern. People are paying attention, and they want answers.

The department is now expanding its request for security footage from anyone living near Guthrie's Catalina Foothills home. They're asking residents to check cameras for two specific windows:

• 9 p.m. to midnight on January 11
• 9:30 a.m. to 11 a.m. on January 31

The January 31 window aligns with the morning of Guthrie's disappearance — a suspicious vehicle was spotted on Via Entrada around 10 a.m. that day. The significance of the January 11 date remains unexplained, but the fact that investigators are looking three weeks before the disappearance suggests they believe this did not begin the day Nancy Guthrie vanished.

National attention reaches the Oval Office

President Donald Trump weighed in after viewing the surveillance footage, saying he felt "pure disgust" at what he saw. FBI Director Kash Patel said Tuesday that agents were looking for "persons" of interest in the case — a deliberate word choice that left open the possibility investigators are tracking more than one individual.

Savannah Guthrie responded to Tuesday's developments with a short Instagram post sharing the FBI's images:

"Someone out there recognizes this person. We believe she is still alive. Bring her home."

That plea carries the weight of a family running out of days and patience. Whether the investigation can deliver on it depends on what those gloves reveal, what those surveillance images produce, and whether the thousands of people calling in tips can fill the gaps that someone clearly tried to create.

What this case exposes

The disappearance of an 84-year-old woman from a quiet Arizona neighborhood is not a policy debate. It is a human tragedy unfolding in real time. But it is also a reminder that safety in this country is not an abstraction. The people most vulnerable — the elderly, those living alone, those who trust the communities around them — deserve a society that takes their protection seriously and pursues justice without hesitation when that protection fails.

Several hundred investigators are working this case. The president of the United States has spoken about it publicly. Nearly 18,000 calls have poured in from ordinary citizens. That is the country working the way it should — galvanized, focused, and unwilling to let an 84-year-old woman simply disappear.

Now the forensics have to catch up to the urgency. A pair of black gloves sits in a lab somewhere in Arizona, and a family waits for a phone call that hasn't come in eleven days.