More than 30 livestreams have disappeared from Alex Zabel’s Criminal Network YouTube channel. Gone. Titles like “Nancy Guthrie Missing Day 90 – Ternero St Neighborhood Watch” and “Nancy Guthrie – Day 130 – Chris Nanos vs. Alex Zabel – Sheriff vs. YouTuber – Round 3… Now Fight!!” No longer publicly available. Just gone.
Except YouTube’s automatic captioning system had already done its job before anyone thought to delete anything.
The subtitle files were there. They’ve been recovered, preserved, converted into searchable PDFs. What someone apparently didn’t want you to find, you can now read at your own pace, in your own time, in a format that doesn’t require an internet connection or a YouTube account or the goodwill of whoever controls the channel.
A record is only inconvenient if someone was counting on there not being one.
The transcripts cover the arc of it. Early on, neighborhood watch style streams. Then something shifts. The tone hardens, the subject matter narrows, and the broadcasts stop being about Nancy Guthrie and start being about Alex Zabel. His right to be there. His equipment. His chair, his umbrella, his rideshare receipts, his strategies for staying put despite citations, despite public pressure, despite whatever law enforcement was doing to move content creators out of the Catalina Foothills.
Day 129 is where it gets specific in ways that are hard to walk back.
He explains the pee tent. In his own words, at length, to his own camera, to his own audience. He bought a portable privacy tent so he could urinate while remaining in the neighborhood without exposing himself in public. He researched Arizona law first. Indecent exposure charges, he figured, would be bad. So he urinated into a Gatorade bottle inside a tent on the public street and then transported the bottle home. He says this himself. On the record. While livestreaming.
He also addresses the allegations that he threw urine. He denies it. Then, in the same breath, he explains that he deliberately created the appearance that he had done so. He calls it “make believe.” He says detectives “fell for it.” He describes staging the event and then telling viewers afterward that he hadn’t actually urinated at that time.
Both things cannot be a defense. Pick one.
Throughout the recovered recordings, he argues that YouTubers deserve the same access as traditional journalists, that deputies were dispatched specifically to remove independent streamers, that Sheriff Chris Nanos ran a coordinated effort against content creators. He criticizes reporters. He describes his interviews with detectives. He builds a case, in public, on camera, for his own legitimacy.
He also volunteers, unprompted, that anyone who looks into his past will find “shootings, grand theft autos, all kinds of drugs.” He says he took responsibility and changed his life. That’s his framing, offered freely, to anyone watching.
The videos are gone now. But the words aren’t. The PDFs below contain the recovered transcripts. Searchable. Permanent. Available to readers, journalists, attorneys, investigators. To anyone who wants to know what was actually said, in context, before someone decided it should disappear.
The public record doesn’t have to depend on what someone chose to leave up.
About the Author
