Gabby Petito: Search for missing woman continues in Grand Teton National Park: LIVE UPDATES
Sgt. Clayton Platt of the Teton County Sheriff's Office tells Fox News on Friday that investigators are conducting physical searches in the area of Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park.
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Florida police confirmed late Friday they are searching for Brian Laundrie, the fiancé of missing woman Gabby Petito.
Officers went to Laundrie’s home on Friday expecting to see him but his family now says they don’t know where he is and he hasn’t been seen since Tuesday, a release from the North Port Police Department said.
Laundrie has been called a “person of interest” in the case and the release reiterated he is not currently wanted for a crime.
“We understand the community’s frustration. We are frustrated too,” the release said. “For six days the North Port Police Department and FBI have been pleading with the family to contact investigators regarding Brian’s Fiancé Gabby Petito.”
Friday was the first time the family had spoken with investigators in detail, the release said.
“It is important to note that while Brian is a person of interest in Gabby’s disappearance, he is not wanted for a crime. We are not currently working a crime investigation. We are now working a multiple missing person investigations.”
Investigators tell Fox News that they expected to find Brian Laundrie when they arrived inside his home on Friday.
Laundrie's family says they haven't seen him since Tuesday and his attorney says he does not know where his client is.
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Fox News has confirmed that Brian Laundrie's family says they have not seen him since Tuesday.
Laundrie's attorney said earlier today that he does not know his client's whereabouts.
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Brian Laundrie's attorney has confirmed to Fox News that his client's whereabouts are unknown.
“Be advised that the whereabouts of Brian Laundrie are currently unknown," attorney Steven Bertolino told Fox News. "The FBI is currently at the Laundrie residence removing property to assist in locating Brian. As of now the FBI is looking for both Gabby and Brian.”
Florida police were seen entering the home of missing Gabby Petito, her fiancé and his parents Friday evening.
Police arrived at 6:20 p.m., and two officers walked out of the home around 7:00 p.m. -- before one returned about one minute later with what appeared to be an evidence envelope.
It was not immediately clear where the fiancé, Brian Laundrie, was – other than not at home."I can't confirm where he's at," North Port Police spokesman Josh Taylor told Fox News Friday evening, :He's a private citizen that's not a suspect."
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Brian Laundrie's home in North Port, Fla., on Friday morning. (Fox News/Sara Ballou)
Fox News has confirmed that Brian Laundrie is not currently inside his home as police search the premises and speak with his family members.
Police could not confirm where exactly Brian Laundrie is at the moment.
"I cant confirm where he's at he's a private citizen not a suspect," North Port Police Department Public Information Officer Josh Taylor told Fox News.
Chants of "dirty Laundrie" could be heard outside the North Port, Florida home of Brian Laundrie where police are currently investigating the disappearance of Laundrie's fiance Gabby Petito.
"We're not going anywhere get your a**** out here," one person could be heard yelling at the cops inside.
"Where is Gabby?" another person could be heard shouting repeatedly
Police could be seen entering the home earlier in the day, one carrying what appeared to be an evidence folder, and a silver Ford Mustang parked outside the home was also searched.
Fox News has confirmed that police have entered Gabby Petito's fiance Brian Laundrie’s house as the search to determine her whereabouts intensifies.
"North Port Police are currently speaking with the Laundrie Family at their request," the North Port Police tweeted Friday. "At this time, we are not speaking with Brian. More details when available."
Newlyweds Kylen Schulte and Crystal Turner were discovered shot to death at a campsite near Moab, Utah. (Kylen Schulte)
Utah investigators have determined that there is no connection between the horrific double murder of a newlywed couple found dead just outside Moab and the missing person case of Gabby Petito, who passed through the city with the fiancé who drove back to Florida without her.
"It has been determined that the Gabby Petito missing person case is not related to the double-homicide case involving Crystal Turner and Kylen Schulte," Grand County Sheriff Steven White said in a statement Friday afternoon.
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Brian Laundrie's home in North Port, Fla., on Friday morning. (Fox News/Sara Ballou)
Gabby Petito’s father was involved in a "public service" incident report at her fiancé Brian Laundrie’s home on Sept. 10, nine days after he returned to Florida without her from a cross-country road trip and a day before she was reported missing by her mother, according to heavily redacted police reports.
Petito did not go to the home physically, North Port police said separately, but expressed concern about his daughter's whereabouts.
Laundrie drove home in Petito’s van from out West without her earlier this month, hired a lawyer and has not assisted investigators in locating the missing 22-year-old.
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A flyer for the event obtained by Fox News
A candlelight vigil is set to take place Friday night in Florida as law enforcement authorities continue to search for Gabby Petito and try to question her fiance Brian Laundrie about her whereabouts.
"Miracles happen all the time - I think Northport needs one," Jason Sternquist of North Port, Florida, who organized the vigil, told Fox News.
The vigil, scheduled for 7 P.M., will take place in front of City Hall in North Port.
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The Bowen Motel on Main Street in Moab, Utah.
Management at the Bowen Motel in Moab, Utah, have confirmed that a nonprofit group booked a room on Aug. 12 – but could not say definitively that it was for Brian Laundrie or that he even spent the night there.
Moab police separated Laundrie and his fiancée, Gabby Petito, that evening following a potential domestic assault call. No major injuries were reported and no charges were filed, but the responding officers got in touch with a nonprofit group to find Laundrie a hotel room and left Petito with her converted van, which the couple had been driving on a cross-country road trip since late June or early July.
Aug. 25 is the last time Petito spoke with her mother from Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, according to the family. Laundrie showed up at his parent’s house in North Port, Fla., six days later – with the van but without his fiancé. Authorities said they seized the van at Laundrie’s parents’ house on Sept. 11 after Petito’s mother reported her missing.
Brian Laundrie, through his lawyer, has still refused to speak with police about the possible whereabouts of his missing fiancé Gabby Petito, whose van he drove home to Florida from out West 10 days before she was reported missing.
Laundrie’s attorney has only released a pair of statements that do not address the missing 22-year-old’s possible whereabouts or last known location.
"I can see why criminal defense lawyer would say, you know what, you can't. You got to stay in the background: Don't talk," said Lara Yeretsia, a leading West Coast-based defense attorney. "but I can also see why it's so difficult in this situation, how horrific it is and what the impact is, because he's the last person who saw her."
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(Fox News)
North Port Police Public Information Officer Josh Taylor said Friday his department has received more than 1,000 tips in the search for missing Gabby Petito, but the vast majority haven’t been helpful.
He did say though that nuggets of information have been useful. In a push for more information from the public, Taylor reminded reporters that Brian Laundrie – the person of interest in this case – didn’t make it back from the western U.S. to Florida in Petito's van on “one tank of gas.”
He also said “nothing has been ruled out” linking Petito’s disappearance to a double-homicide in the Moab, Utah area where the couple visited, but he has “heard of no definitive connections.”
Taylor also said Laundrie’s sister Cassie – who recently told ABC’s “Good Morning America” she spoke to investigators, unlike Brian – provided nothing of substance in the search for Petito’s whereabouts.
(Fox News)
Here is a map of Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming and Jenny Lake, where "authorities have narrowed down their search efforts," according to a tweet from KSL 5 TV.
Sgt. Clayton Platt of the Teton County Sheriff's Office tells Fox News' Laura Ingle Friday that investigators are conducting physical searches in the area of Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park, but would not disclose where exactly they are looking for signs of missing Gabby Petito.
The development comes as the FBI’s Denver Office has become involved in the investigation.
The couple converted this 2012 Ford white van into a camper while on Florida earlier this year. (Joe Petito)
The search for missing Gabby Petito reportedly is centering Friday on a particular area within Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park, according to a report.
“Thanks to a tipster who gave a concrete description of #GabbyPetito's van, authorities have narrowed down their search efforts to the Jenny Lake area in Grand Teton National Park,” KSL 5 TV wrote in a tweet.
Shannon Baker, a witness, told the station that she and her husband spotted Petito and Brian Laundrie’s van in the Jenny Lake parking area on 5 p.m. on Aug. 25.
“I’m sure of it,” Baker said. “It had the black ladder on the back and the two black rooftops on top, the two bars, and we made the comment that would be the perfect little camper van to go around in.”
Baker told KSL 5 TV that she didn’t think much of the sighting at first until the story started picking up traction on social media.
“I said, ‘Oh my god! That’s the same van we saw,’” Baker said.
Gabby Petito’s family is continuing to speak out about her disappearance as her fiance, Brian Laundrie, remains silent. Jim Schmidt, Gabby’s stepfather, said the family is "speechless" that Laundrie won’t come forward with information despite their desperate pleas for information to help law enforcement.
Schmidt said the family is beyond frustrated that Laundrie won’t speak to authorities considering he was the last person known to have contact with her.
"Frustrating is an understatement," Schmidt said on "America’s Newsroom."
"It makes no sense to any one of us why he won't come out and speak. He's the one that was traveling with her. They were going across the country together," he said.
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Gabby Petito used an app called AllTrails to document some of her hiking and driving activity in states across the country.
A number of the hikes she documented on AllTrails lines up with the content she posted on Instagram.
On July 7, for example, Petito marked herself at the "Dunes Trail from Pinyon Flats" in Colorado; three days later, she posted her first photo from the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve.
Petito's last recorded hike was in Mystic Hot Springs in Colorado on July 24; two days later, she posted photos from Mystic Hot Springs to her Instagram.
The Moonflower Cooperative organic grocery store in Moab, Utah, is a point of connection between two unsolved cases that have attracted national attention.
Kylen Schulte, a 24-year-old newlywed who vanished on Aug. 13 and was found shot to death with her wife five days later, had worked at the Moonflower Cooperative for four years, according to a tribute to her on the store's Instagram.
On Aug. 12, she worked until 3 p.m., the manager told Fox News. At around 4:30 p.m., police respond to a domestic call outside the store involving Gabby Petito, a 24-year-old who has since gone missing, and her fiance, Brian Laundrie, 23.
Moab police bodycam video shows a highly distraught Petito explaining the couple got in a fight after she spent hours working on her blog at a nearby coffee shop and that tensions had been building for days.
Ultimately, police decided not to charge anyone but separated Petito and Laundrie that evening, sending him to a hotel and telling her to stay with the van -- which prompted a nervous response and her telling the officer she doesn't usually drive the van.
Police in the vicinity of Laundrie's home in North Port, Fla., on Friday morning. (Fox News/Sara Ballou)
An attorney for Gabby Petito’s family reportedly has sent CBS News a statement saying that "Gabby's family was instructed by law enforcement to not discuss the details of Gabby and Brian's relationship.”
Brian Laundrie is considered a person of interest in Petito’s disappearance.
Meanwhile, patience is wearing thin in North Port, Fla. -- where Laundrie lives -- as police are intervening in response to homeowners’ complaints of members of the media parking on lawns and disturbing the normally quiet neighborhood.
Fox News' Sara Ballou contributed to this report.
Brian Laundrie's home in North Port, Fla., on Friday morning. (Fox News/Sara Ballou)
Concerned parents in North Port, Fla., are set Friday to protest outside of the home of Brian Laundrie – the person of interest in Gabby Petito’s disappearance – urging him to speak out and cooperate with investigators.
The demonstration planned for 5 p.m. local time comes as the family of the missing 22-year-old has made repeated pleas for Laundrie to reveal more information.
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Joe Petito, the father of the Florida woman who vanished last month while on a cross-country trip with her boyfriend, was critical of an interview that a sibling of the boyfriend gave about the disappearance.
Cassie Laundrie, the sister of Brian Laundrie, told ABC that it goes without saying that the family wants Gabby Petito to be found safe.
"She's like a sister and my children love her, and all I want is for her to come home safe and found and this to be just a big misunderstanding," she said.
Gabby’s father Joe Petito told NewsNation’s Ashleigh Banfield that he found the sister's remarks to be less than reassuring, given the urgency of the search for his daughter.
"If that’s that family’s version of love, to just ignore and not care that someone’s gone,” Joe Petito said, “and people are looking for them and entire countries looking for them, I mean, that explains how we got to where we are today. Because I mean, look at their version of what they call love.”
Investigators say Gabby Petito, 22, was last in contact with her family in late August when the couple was visiting Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park. Much of their trip was documented on social media accounts that abruptly ceased. The woman's family has been critical of Brian Laundrie and his family for allegedly not cooperating in the investigation.
The stepfather of a young woman who went missing over last month, reportedly in the Mountain West, told Fox News Thursday he adamantly wants Brian Laundrie to cooperate with the investigation.
Jim Schmidt, who lives on Long Island, N.Y., traveled to Wyoming's Grand Tetons – which he believes was the last place Petito, 22, was seen – as she and Brian Laundrie continued a weeks-long road trip around the sprawling national parks of the Mountain West.
Schmidt said police bodycam video of the couple's encounter with Moab, Utah, authorities earlier in the trip – in which they were separated for the night to prevent further issues – was hard to watch because of how emotional the woman was for the entire hour of footage.
"It is absolutely mind-boggling to our entire family and friends that you are on this cross-country road trip and you have been together for so long and every picture and video that we see is that you seem to be enjoying yourselves you say she is the love of your life; she is missing and you were on a trip with her, but you have no comment, you have nothing to say and you're hiding behind an attorney," Schmidt said.
Brian Laundrie recently retained counsel and has been silent on the case, which Schmidt said was indeed his constitutional right, but not the right thing to do when his fiancee is missing.
Lara Yeretsian, a criminal defense attorney based on the west coast, said that complicated cases like the disappearance of Gabby Petito need to be taken day-by-day, but she thinks an arrest could come soon.
"I wouldn't be surprised if there's an arrest, an arrest of the fiancé," Yeretsian said Thursday."Fiancés are going to want to help. Most fiancés who love their girlfriend or their significant other, they're going to do everything in their power to help. This tells me something is not right."
The Grand County Sheriff’s Office said Thursday that it is "actively looking into any connection" between a double homicide of newlyweds at a campground outside Moab last month and the recent disappearance of Gabby Petito.
"The Sheriff’s Office is not ruling anything out at this time and appreciate the concerns of the public and their willingness to contact this office with those concerns and information," the Grand County Sheriff's Office said in a statement.
The newlyweds, 38-year-old Crystal Turner and 24-year-old Kylen Schulte, were found shot to death at a campground southeast of Moab on Aug. 18, five days after they were last seen leaving a downtown bar.
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