Following the killing of his girlfriend Gabby Petito, Brian Laundrie reportedly made up to 20 calls to his parents within two days.
The flurry of calls was unlike Laundrie’s usual pattern of communication with his parents, DailyMail reports. In the two months leading up to Gabby Petito’s death, he had reportedly only called his father, Christopher, once, and his mother, Roberta, five times.
Laundrie initially reached out to his parents at around 4 p.m. on August 29, 2021, reportedly a few days after Gabby’s last conversation with her mother, Nichole. His first call lasted around 55 minutes, with a subsequent call that lasted around 22 minutes, according to phone records obtained by the outlet.
According to a November 2023 court filing, two days after the last known sighting of Gabby, Brian Laundrie informed his parents that she was “gone” and asked for an attorney.
Additional conversations unfolded throughout the next day. According to Petito family attorney Pat Reilly, the majority of these calls were between Laundrie and his mother, Roberta.
“Brian told Christopher, ‘Gabby’s gone, I need a lawyer.’ And he was frantic, in Christopher’s words,” Reilly said.
“They refused to acknowledge that that meant Gabby was dead, which flies in the face of logic. If your son calls and he’s frantic and he says, ‘She’s gone, I need a lawyer.’ What other explanation of ‘gone’ could there be?”
Chris Laundrie, according to Reilly, thought that Brian Laundrie meant, “something to the effect of, well, there were times that Gabby would leave and go away for a couple days to meet with her friends or she’d just leave for a couple hours when she was living with us.”
“That was his explanation for why he couldn’t admit that ‘gone’ meant she was dead. It was a flurry of calls on those two days. The calls between Brian and his parents prior to that were very sporadic, around five.”
Following the calls, Laundrie’s parents hired lawyer Steve Bertolino to represent their son.
Gabby Petito vanished in August 2021 while on a cross-country road trip with Laundrie. Her remains were found at a campsite in the Bridger-Teton National Forest in Wyoming on September 19, 2021. Authorities concluded that she died by manual strangulation.
After murdering Petito, Laundrie is believed to have driven the van the couple was traveling in back to his parents’ home in North Port, Florida, where he arrived on September 1 alone.
Laundrie later drove to a nearby nature reserve in Florida about 10 minutes from his parents’ home, where he committed suicide. Investigators recovered what appeared to be a written confession by Laundrie that he murdered Petito.
Members of the Laundrie and Petito families have been questioned in depositions over the past several months as part of the civil case filed against the Laundrie couple in 2022.
In a separate wrongful-death lawsuit brought by Petito’s family, Brian Laundrie’s estate agreed to pay a $3 million settlement last year.
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[Feature Photo: Brian and Gabby/Instagram]
