Gabby Petito’s Parents Share Photo of Bruising, Say Officers Ignored Her Visible Injuries

Amid their ongoing lawsuit against the Moab, Utah, police department, Gabby Petito’s parents on Tuesday released a photo of their late daughter showing visible injuries on her face and that their lawyers said was taken the same day that police officers pulled over her and her boyfriend, Brian Laundrie, for a wellness check on Aug. 12, 2021. Laundrie killed Petito at a Wyoming campsite about a month later.

Last year, Petito’s parents filed suit against the department, specifically naming the two officers who pulled over Petito and Laundrie after witnesses called the police to report a possible domestic violence incident. The $50 million suit claims the officers should have recognized basic warning signs of intimate partner violence, and that this could have saved Petito’s life. The photo underscores just how much evidence of the threat that Laundrie posed to Petito that officers either missed or willfully ignored.

Addressing reporters on Tuesday, the family’s lawyer, Brian Stewart, said the photo shows that Petito “was grabbed over her face in such a way that her airways were likely obstructed” and that officers “completely ignored” “the seriousness and significance” of Petito’s injuries.

Body camera footage from Petito’s encounter with the two Moab police officers, Eric Pratt and Daniel Robbins, shows that even though the officers were called by a witness who claimed to have seen Laundrie slap Petito, Pratt and Robbins deemed Petito the “predominant aggressor,” ostensibly for fighting back against Laundrie. The officers even threatened to put Petito in jail, and before parting ways, one of the officers fist-bumped Laundrie.

Stewart argued that the photo suggests that contrary to officers’ characterization of Petito, she was “likely strangled and/or suffocated by Laundrie” before police arrived. The photo, Stewart insists, is further evidence that police “failed to listen to Gabby, failed to investigate her injuries and the seriousness of her assault, and failed to follow their own training, policies and Utah law.”

Pratt and Robbins issued Laundrie and Petito a warning and separated them by paying to put Laundrie up in a nearby hotel while leaving Petito to sleep alone in the couple’s van—even as she was in the midst of a visible mental health crisis. Further, Pratt and Robbins declined to interview or check in with the witness who saw Laundrie hit Petito, or other witnesses who said they saw the couple fighting. A month later, Petito was found dead. Shortly thereafter, Laundrie wrote a note confessing to killing her, and died by suicide.

The bruising on Petito’s face isn’t immediately clear in the grainy, blurry body cam footage. But the new photo published by Petito’s family shows prominent injuries.

Back in November, the lawsuit filed by Petito’s parents unearthed a bombshell allegation that, while Pratt served as police chief in Deaton—a different small town in Utah—a woman alleged that he’d threatened to kill her while they were in a relationship in 2017. The woman told the Salt Lake Tribune that when she learned Pratt was seeing other women, she threatened to expose their relationship. In response, she said Pratt pulled her over in a grocery store parking lot using the police siren attached to his personal truck and then, while her toddler was sitting in the backseat, he threatened to kill her with a crowbar if she told anyone. The Tribune also reported that Pratt had been close friends with the mayor of Deaton, who told the paper that he’d ignored the woman’s reports about Pratt because Pratt hadn’t been in uniform while making the threats against her.

The allegations against Pratt align with studies from the 1990s that found that at least 40 percent of police officers reported that they’d exhibited behavior that was technically domestic abuse. And as Petito’s parents continue their work to hold the Moab Police Department accountable, stories like their daughter’s remain tragically common—often enough, when victims of intimate partner abuse call for help, they are ignored or even accused of being the “primary aggressor” for defending themselves.