PEMBROKE PARK, Fla. – Gabby Petito was 22 years old when her 23-year-old boyfriend, Brian Laundrie killed her in 2021 during a cross-country American road trip in a van that they documented online. Their pictures on social media did not show the warning signs that were later uncovered in text messages and letters.
During a recent interview with ABC News, Petito’s mother, Nichole Schmid, was in tears when she talked about the Moab City Police Department’s officer bodycam video showing her daughter in Utah asking for help to call her mother after a man reported Laundrie had slapped her in the face.
After Laundrie drove the van from Wyoming to his parents' house in North Port, Florida, without her, Petito’s father, Joe Petito, said he sent Laundrie a message threatening to talk to the police if he didn’t tell him where his daughter was. It went unanswered.
Detectives would later find Petito dead by strangulation in Wyoming’s Bridger–Teton National Forest on Sept. 19, 2021, and Laundrie dead by suicide in Florida’s Myakkahatchee Creek Environmental Park on Oct. 20, 2021.
Tara Petito, her stepmother, said she still feels Petito’s presence sometimes, and Jim Schmid, her stepfather, said the domestic violence tragedy has helped other victims to get out of potentially deadly romantic relationships.
The tragedy is the subject of “American Murder: Gabby Petito,” a three-part documentary on Netflix