Family members of a 22-year-old woman whose boyfriend admitted to killing her last year have filed a wrongful death suit against the Moab Police Department, claiming their negligence led to her death weeks later.
The lawsuit is the most recent development in the well-known case involving the passing of Gabby Petito.
What started as a missing person’s case last summer rode a wave of true crime obsession to become a social media hit, attracting amateur online sleuths and the kind of global attention that can aid authorities in finding missing people.
Petito and her boyfriend, 23-year-old Brian Laundrie, were stopped by police officers in Moab, Utah last summer but were ultimately not cited for domestic violence amid signs of distress and their own statements about physical conflict.
After being strangled, Petito’s body was eventually discovered at Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.
Laundrie was the only person ever identified by law enforcement as a person of interest and was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after returning alone to his parents’ home in Florida.
An unprecedented national conversation about dating violence was sparked by the contrast between the upbeat façade displayed on Petito’s popular Instagram account, where she chronicled her cross-country trip in a van to tens of thousands of followers, and the darker reality of domestic violence she was experiencing in the months before her death.
Additionally, it prompted criticism of the government and the media for giving missing white women like Petito more attention than missing and murdered indigenous women and women of colour in general.
To honour Petito’s memory and ensure that warning signals of abuse are recognised by authorities who can take action, her mother, father, and other family members have worked to keep her name in the headlines.
“Laws have been implemented to safeguard victims. And those laws were not followed.
Nicole Schmidt, Petito’s mother, said in a trembling voice, “And we don’t want this to happen to anybody else.
At a press conference on Thursday in Salt Lake City, Schmidt, several family members, and their legal team stood in front of an old photograph of Petito grinning in a slot canyon.
The police department in Moab, a small town in rural Utah that serves as the gateway to national parks with red rock canyons and mesas, is being sued for $50 million in the wrongful death case.
It lays blame for Petito’s death on the city’s police officers, who did not issue a domestic violence citation after a bystander called to report conflict between Petito and Laundrie. The lawsuit contends that by doing so, the police failed to recognise indications of violence that they ought to have been trained to see.
The lawsuit further asserts that police officers “coached Gabby to offer answers that the officers utilised to support their decision not to enforce Utah law,” which mandates that allegations of domestic violence be addressed.
Officer Eric Pratt of the Moab Police Department “was fundamentally biassed in his approach to the investigation, choosing to believe Gabby’s abuser, ignoring evidence that Gabby was the victim, and purposefully looking for loopholes to get around Utah law’s requirements and his duty to protect Gabby.
The complaint grounds that allegation of bias on “Witness 1,” an unidentified woman who claims Pratt threatened to kill her after their relationship ended while he was police chief in Salina, Utah, a different small community.
Through Moab city authorities, a message was left with Pratt, but it wasn’t immediately answered. After the lawsuit was filed, the city of Moab said the death was tragic yet not the fault of their police department.
“Our police treated Ms. Petito with kindness, respect, and understanding,” said Lisa Adams, a city spokeswoman. The City of Moab will vigorously defend itself against this lawsuit because no one could have foreseen the tragedy that would take place weeks later and hundreds of kilometres away. ”
The lawsuit follows a notice of claim filed in August, notifying Moab that Petito’s family intended to file for damages due to wrongful death.
A January independent review found that police had committed “many inadvertent mistakes,” including failing to cite Petito for domestic violence after she admitted to hitting her partner.
The family of Gabby Petito sues the Moab Police Department for wrongful death.
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