(SALT LAKE CITY) — A massive search is continuing in southern Florida for Brian Laundrie, the boyfriend of Gabby Petito, the 22-year-old woman who went missing on a cross-country trip and who authorities confirmed Tuesday as the body discovered on Sunday in the Bridger-Teton National Forest in Wyoming.

The search for the 23-year-old Laundrie is centered around North Port, Florida, where investigators said Laundrie returned to his home on September 1 without Petito but driving her 2012 Ford Transit.

Laundrie has been named by police as a “person of interest” in Petito’s disappearance. Laundrie has refused to speak to the police and has not been seen since Tuesday, Sept. 14, according to law enforcement officials.

The search for Laundrie is the latest twist in the case that has grabbed national attention as he and Petito had been traveling across the country since June, documenting the trip on social media.

Petito’s parents, who live in Long Island, New York, reported her missing on Sept. 11 after not hearing from her for two weeks.

 

Sep 22, 12:44 pm

Underwater recovery team dispatched to Carlton Reserve

The Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office confirmed on Twitter Wednesday that its Underwater Recovery Force team has been dispatched to the Carlton Reserve near North Port, where the search for Laundrie is focused.

The sheriff’s office, one of multiple law enforcement agencies involved in the search, did not elaborate on why the team was needed at the search site.

We continue to respond to requests for mutual aid from neighboring law enforcement agencies & federal partners. To confirm, yes, members of our Sheriff’s Underwater Recovery Force have responded to Carlton Reserve. This in addition to our Emergency Response Team, Air-1 & patrol. pic.twitter.com/LcagDcofLL

— SarasotaSheriff (@SarasotaSheriff) September 22, 2021

“We continue to respond to requests for mutual aid from neighboring law enforcement agencies & federal partners. To confirm, yes, members of our Sheriff’s Underwater Recovery Force have responded to Carlton Reserve,” reads the agency’s tweet.

 

Sep 22, 12:42 pm

2nd witness corroborates domestic dispute between couple

The Moab, Utah, police department has released a report from a second witness claiming he saw Gabby Petito and Brian Laundrie engaged in a domestic dispute in Moab on Aug. 12.

The witness told police he observed a man and a woman, later identified Petito and Laundrie, arguing over a cellphone about 4:30 in the afternoon outside a grocery store in Moab, according to a statement from police.

“They were talking aggressively @ each other & something seemed off. At one point they were sort of fighting over a phone — I think the male took the female’s phone. It appeared that he didn’t want her in the white van. He got into the driver’s seat & she followed him. At one point she was punching him in the arm and/or face & trying to get into the van,” the witness wrote in the police report.

The witness, according to the statement, said the woman eventually climbed over the driver to get into the passenger seat and that she was overheard saying, “Why do you have to be so mean”?

“I wasn’t sure how serious this was — it was hard to tell if it was sort of play fighting, but from my point of view something definitely didn’t seem right. It was as if this guy was trying to leave her, and maybe take her phone? Not sure but wanted to help out,” the witness wrote.

Around the same time, a 911 caller told a Grand County, Utah, Sheriff’s Office dispatcher that he witnessed Laundrie allegedly “slapping” Petito and chasing her up and down a sidewalk hitting her, according to a recording released by the sheriff’s office.

 

Sep 22, 10:54 am

Search for Brian Laundrie presses on as Petito family plans funeral

As a massive search continued Wednesday for Brian Laundrie in south Florida’s Carlton Reserve, the family of Gabby Petito was making arrangements to bring her remains home to her native New York for a funeral.

A large team of law enforcement officers and police K-9 units resumed their search of the roughly 25,000-acre preserve near North Port, Florida, where Laundrie’s relatives told police he claimed he was headed to when they last spoke to him on September 14.

Photos posted on Twitter Wednesday morning by the North Port Police Department showed officers from multiple agencies plotting areas to search, along with other images of high-water vehicles and search dogs.

 

Sep 21, 11:44 pm

Search ends for another day with ‘nothing of note’ found

The North Port Police Department said it had ended its search of the Carlton Reserve as darkness closed in with nothing found.

“Search of the Carlton & nearby lands concluded for the evening. Nothing of note,” the police department shared in a tweet. “The current plan is to return Wednesday with a similar operation.”

Search of the Carlton & nearby lands concluded for the evening. Nothing of note. The current plan is to return Wednesday with a similar operation. We join the FBI in asking for continued public assistance by sharing any info 1-800-CALL FBI or https://t.co/vlIagGIoHc pic.twitter.com/5DWopahBI8

— North Port Police (@NorthPortPolice) September 21, 2021

Police shared a photo of the search operation’s base in the reserve as well as one of the bloodhounds being used to look for the missing person of interest in conjunction with the death of his girlfriend.

Gabby Petito’s body was officially identified on Tuesday evening after it was found near Grand Teton National Park on Sunday. The Teton County coroner said Petito died via homicide, but did not yet announce a cause of death.

Sarasota police also later debunked a rumor that Laundrie had been taken into custody. It said on Twitter that they had received several tips about him being seen, but none of them panned out.

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(LOUISVILLE) — A 16-year-old boy was killed and two other children were hurt in a shooting at a school bus stop in Louisville, Kentucky, Wednesday morning, according to local police.

The three children were waiting for a bus when they were shot in a drive-by at about 6:30 a.m. local time, police said.

One of the injured kids, a 14-year-old boy, is in the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, police said. The other survivor, a 14-year-old girl, was treated for minor injuries at the scene, police said.

 

“I had to hold the wound of a little boy and tell him he was going to be OK.” Neighbors enraged over the number of shootings affecting our kids. This one at a bus stop. One student telling me, it’s not a good day to have anxiety. @WHAS11 pic.twitter.com/yvvEHCX9jO

— Brooke Hasch (@WHAS11Hasch) September 22, 2021

Police are looking for the occupants of a grey Jeep they say was in the area at the time of the shooting.

 

Alert: We’re looking for this vehicle in the area of this morning’s homicide. We need to talk to any occupants who may have information on this.
Grey Jeep license plate with Illinois plate BD91644. Call 574-LMPD. You can remain anonymous. We need your help #LMPD #Louisville pic.twitter.com/j690CrF2CF

— LMPD (@LMPD) September 22, 2021

The three victims have not been identified but Jefferson County Public Schools Superintendent Marty Pollio said they are students at Eastern High School.

The school bus arrived shortly after the “traumatic” slaying, Pollio said, and a bus stop for middle schoolers was close by.

LMPD and JCPS officials are at the scene. Waiting for their response on a bus stop shooting that sent three kids to the hospital around 6:30 this morning. @WHAS11 pic.twitter.com/fndpPRI9t4

— Brooke Hasch (@WHAS11Hasch) September 22, 2021

This is one of our toughest days at @JCPSKY. We have suffered another devastating loss to senseless gun violence. Our hearts go out to the family of the Eastern HS student whose life was ended. We are providing support for the students.

— Dr. Marty Pollio (@JCPSSuper) September 22, 2021

This marked Louisville’s 145th homicide of the year, officials said.

Louisville Metropolitan Police Chief Erika Shields called it a “heinous crime.”

Shields said the city is tackling gun violence and “getting violent felons off the street daily.” However, she added, “the availability of illegal guns is just so widespread.”

Our hearts break this morning with the news of the senseless violence targeting children waiting for a school bus. This is unacceptable. Report those responsible. Contact us (263-6000) or @LMPD (574-LMPD). The safety of our community depends on ALL of us working together. pic.twitter.com/zXPvqcc2oq

— FBI Louisville (@FBILouisville) September 22, 2021

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(NEW YORK) — In the two weeks since Gabby Petito went missing while on a cross-country trip with her boyfriend, her story has gained national attention.

Petito’s case has made news headlines and gone viral online, with people everywhere trying to find clues and solve the case themselves. Adding to the intrigue in Petito’s case is the large social media footprint she left behind as she documented her travels cross-country with her boyfriend, Brian Laundrie.

Officials confirmed Tuesday that a body found over the weekend near Grand Teton National Park belongs to 22-year-old Petito, but the national fascination with the case continues, as authorities search for Laundrie, currently a person of interest in the case.

It is a fascination that families of other missing people, particularly women of color, say they wish was turned to their own loved ones’ cases.

“Everybody who is missing loved ones is saying, ‘Why wasn’t my case done that like?'” said Paula Cosey Hill. “It’s very hard because it takes you back to when your child went missing.”

Cosey Hill’s then-16-year-old daughter, Shemika Cosey, disappeared without a trace near her home in St. Louis, Missouri, just a few days after Christmas in 2008.

She described watching the search for Petito unfold as an “emotional rollercoaster,” since she has both grieved for the Petito family and reflected on what did not happen in the aftermath of her daughter’s disappearance.

“All the questions that weren’t answered with my daughter, I’m checking to see if they’re doing in that case,” said Cosey Hill. “When you report your loved one missing, you hear, ‘We’ll try to get someone on this,’ and they act as if they don’t have enough manpower to do it.”

“But as you can see, they can get enough manpower to do it,” she said. “They just choose which cases they want to do.”

Natalie Wilson, co-founder of the Black and Missing Foundation, Inc., an online search agency that helps search specifically for missing Black and Hispanic children, said minority children who go missing are often classified as runaways, which can lead to less media attention and less help from law enforcement.

Minority adults who go missing are often stereotyped as being involved in crime or violence, poverty and addiction, which takes attention away from their cases too, Wilson said.

“There’s frustration. There’s sadness,” she said of the people she works with who are searching for their missing loved ones. “We are meeting families at the worst points in their lives. They are frustrated because they’re not getting help from law enforcement or they’re frustrated because they’re not getting media coverage.”

At the end of 2020, the FBI had over 89,000 active missing person cases, and 45% of those were people of color, according to the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC).

Only about one-fifth of missing person cases involving minorities are covered by the news, according to a 2016 analysis published in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology.

“I think oftentimes the media and even law enforcement can show that [minority] lives are not as important,” Wilson said. “We have to remember that these are mothers and daughters and fathers and children that are missing and they are definitely needed and valued in our communities.”

The historic tendency for national attention to gloss over cases of missing people of color was dubbed “missing white woman syndrome” by Gwen Ifill, the late PBS anchor.

Many years later, the term coined by Ifill still applies in the U.S., according to Wilson, who noted the effort to publicize missing persons of color is not meant to divert resources, but to simply “equal the playing field.”

“We’ve been sounding the alarm for close to 14 years that this is an issue and we need to have that conversation, all of us, as to how we can change the narrative,” she said. “We’re not surprised by the publicity or the reaction [to Petito’s disappearance] and we are also hoping and working to keep our missing in the forefront as well.”

Maricris Drouaillet, of Riverside, California, said she too was not surprised by the reaction to Petito’s disappearance, but said it has brought up emotions of “hurt and heartbreak.”

Drouaillet and her family have spent nearly nine months searching for her sister, Maya Millete, a mother of three who disappeared from her home in Chula Vista, California, in January. Millete’s husband was named a person of interest in her disappearance in July.

“Even before Gabby’s case was out there, I felt that maybe if we were white or with money or had names, we probably would have gotten a different approach, more help and support,” said Drouaillet, whose family moved to the U.S. from the Philippines when Millete was 12. “That’s how I feel. That hurts a lot.”

Drouaillet said she and her family have led searches on their own since January, and have created a website and social media accounts to organize resources and call attention to their sister’s missing person case.

“Every missing person deserves to be in a headline,” she said. “We have to put awareness out there and seek help from the public, because a lot of times the public are the ones who help solve the case.”

In Wyoming, where Petito went missing and where her body was found, a state task force released a report in January on missing and murdered Indigenous people.

While 21% of Indigenous people, who are mostly girls, remained missing for 30 days or longer, only 11% of white people remained missing that long, according to the report.

The report also found that 30% of Indigenous missing and murdered people made the news, compared to 51% of white people. When coverage was done on Indigenous victims, it was more likely to “contain violent language, portray the victim in a negative light, and provide less information,” according to the report.

Cara Boyle Chambers, director of the division of victim services in Wyoming’s Attorney General office, said the Petito case has echoed the report’s findings.

“It highlighted exactly what we had pointed out, the disproportionate, very positive response to Gabby’s story versus a lot of other families who don’t have that attention and don’t have that closure that came, in the scheme of things, relatively quickly,” Boyle Chambers said. “We have families that are 20, 30 years of no answers and no remains to bury and no sense of closure.”

Boyle Chambers — who pointed out that two men went missing in June in the same area where Petito was last seen — said officials in Wyoming have worked since the report’s release to improve the collection of missing persons and criminal justice data.

The Petito case has also confirmed the importance of galvanizing media attention, including social media, according to Boyle Chambers.

“I think that is the biggest takeaway too from Gabby’s case, just how important the role of social media and people out there were in helping to locate her,” she said. “The more eyes you have on it, the better, which is why we’re having this whole conversation.”

Wilson, of the Black and Missing Foundation, said individual people can make a difference by sharing alerts about missing people and talking about missing person cases, involving minorities, in particular.

“We all have a responsibility, and that is law enforcement, the media and the community,” she said. “If you just have one tip, it can solve a case.”

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