The parents of Blue Point native Gabrielle “Gabby” Petito have alleged in an amendment to their ongoing lawsuit that Brian Laundrie told his parents that Petito was “gone” and he needed a lawyer during a frantic phone call weeks before her body was found in September 2021 in a national forest in Wyoming.
The new allegations are contained in an amended complaint to the lawsuit filed in 2022 against Roberta and Christopher Laundrie, alleging they knew Petito was dead but acted with “malice and great indifference” to the rights of Petito’s parents because of the Laundries’ “willfulness and maliciousness” in withholding information about Petito from the time she was last heard from until her body was found.
The attorney for Petito’s parents — Nichole Schmidt and Joe Petito — did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Newsday. But the Florida-based attorney Pat Reilly said in other interviews that the new information came from depositions taken from both Laundrie parents in the lead-up to the civil trial scheduled for May 2024.
East Islip-based attorney Steven Bertolino, who represents the Laundries, said Tuesday: “That information is not the full version of what was testified to during the depositions but somewhat accurate. We will be filing our answers in the next few days.”
Petito, 22, and Laundrie, 23, who were engaged, had departed Long Island on a cross-country skiing trip in Petito’s white van in July 2021. She last communicated with her family by phone on Aug. 27, 2021 — the day Petito’s family believes Laundrie killed their daughter, according to the lawsuit.
Petito’s body was found Sept. 19, 2021, in a national forest in Wyoming “near where she and Brian Laundrie had been seen together,” the FBI has said. Petito died as a result of “blunt-force injuries to the head and neck and manual strangulation,” the Teton County coroner’s office has said. Laundrie, who later committed suicide, confessed to killing Petito in a…
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