What we know about Gabby Petito’s final days

Over the summer, Gabby Petito set out with her fiancé, Brian Laundrie, to travel across the country in her white Ford van, planning to hit national parks throughout the western United States.

For the past year, the young woman regularly posted pictures with Laundrie on her Instagram account, sharing last May she couldn’t wait to start “traveling the world” with him and several weeks later, in July 2020, announcing he had asked her to marry him.

“I said yes!” Petito had written in an Instagram caption. “Everyday is such a dream with you.”

She documented their trip this summer on social media, posting pictures of herself smiling in Kansas’ Monument Rocks, posing on the Great Sand Dunes in Colorado and taking in the views of Utah’s Bryce Canyon National Park.

But when the camera turned off, a different reality was unfolding. The trip seemed to be straining the relationship and the two were seen arguing by passersby — at one point so intensely, at least one person called authorities to report it.

Petito called her mom regularly, and those conversations appeared to reveal there was “more and more tension” in Petito’s relationship, according to a police affidavit for a search warrant of an external hard drive found in the couple’s van.

In late August, Petito’s calls to her mother stopped. The regular social media posts ceased. And on September 11, her family reported her missing.

“She would go off the grid, you know, while she was out there, doing her van-life stuff, exploring these different areas,” Jim Schmidt, Petito’s stepfather had said when she was missing. “It wasn’t uncommon for her to go off for a few days at a time but she’d always make her way back to someplace where she could get on to a Wi-Fi connection, upload to her Instagram, make phone calls, FaceTime to come home.”

The FBI announced on September 19 authorities had found human remains “consistent with the description of” Petito. The remains were later confirmed to be those of Petito. The FBI said the initial determination for Petito’s manner of death is homicide.

A search for Laundrie, who returned to the couple’s Florida home on September 1 without Petito and vanished two weeks later, is ongoing.

New, slowly emerging details help paint a picture of what the days before Petito’s death may have looked like.

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The two were stopped by police

On August 12, nearly three weeks before Laundrie arrived back in Florida at the home he shared with Petito and his parents, someone drove by a couple with a white van with a Florida license plate and called 911 to report they saw “the gentleman was slapping the girl.”

“Then we stopped,” the caller told dispatchers, according to a 911 audio recording from that day that was provided by the Grand County Sheriff’s Office. “They ran up and down the sidewalk. He proceeded to hit her, hopped in the car and they drove off.”

A Moab, Utah, police officer who spotted the van later wrote in a police report he saw Petito sitting in the passenger seat and “crying uncontrollably.”

In bodycam footage from the Moab Police Department that was obtained by CNN, an officer is heard asking the young woman, who was visibly shaken, to step out of the van and sit inside his vehicle in hopes of helping her calm down. Petito said the two had been fighting that morning and going through “some personal issues.”

“I have OCD and sometimes I get really frustrated,” Petito said, adding later, “He wouldn’t let me in the car before.”

When the officer asked why, the young woman responded, “He told me I needed to calm down, but I’m perfectly calm.”

“At no point in my investigation did Gabrielle stop crying, breathing heavily, or compose a sentence without needing to wipe away tears, wipe her nose or rub her knees with her hands,” officer Daniel Scott Robbins wrote in the report.