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The FBI confirmed on Thursday afternoon that the remains found this Wednesday in Florida belong to Brian Laundrie, boyfriend of Gabby Petito, the 22-year-old whose death has attracted media attention since her disappearance at the end of August, while she was embarked on a couple’s van trip across the United States that she relayed to her hundreds of thousands of followers on social media. The cause of death of Laundrie, who was considered a “person of interest” in the investigation, has not been disclosed.
The finding ends a month-long search for the 23-year-old, whose disappearance was reported by his family on September 17. During this time, they combed the surroundings of their family home in Sarasota County (Florida), specifically in the slightly more than 10,000 hectares of the Carlton Reserve, a wetland that is home to alligators, coyotes, lynxes or snakes. On Wednesday they found some of his belongings, including a notebook and a backpack, at the park entrance, in an area that had previously been subjected to scrutiny. Examination of the corpse’s teeth led to its identification
The couple were last seen on August 25 at Grand Teton Park in Wyoming. They were heading to Yellowstone on a multi-month van trip that combined two passions shared by many young Americans: exploring the wilderness of the national parks, and enjoying a sabbatical in which to experience some freedom before dealing with the obligations of adult life. Six days before the last publication of her on their social networks, the couple starred in a fight in Moab, Utah, which was recorded by the body camera of a policeman. He went to the place alerted by a possible incident of gender violence. That footage sparked suspicions that under the guise of a perfect life broadcast by Instagram there was a toxic relationship between the two that ended in tragedy.
Petito’s body was found on September 19 in that Wyoming park. He died, according to the autopsy, by strangulation. No one has yet been charged with the death of the young woman. Her family had reported Gabby’s disappearance a week earlier, after her partner had returned to her parental home only on day 1. Boyfriends since high school, they had lived together since 2019 at his parents’ house and had been engaged since July 2020.
The case has ignited a social debate in a country in which more than half a million people disappear a year, according to calculations by the Statista website. Why has one in particular, the white, blonde and seemingly perfect Gabby, attracted all eyes and unleashed the compassion of the media, while thousands of cases of people of other ethnicities and social backgrounds go unnoticed? The black journalist Gwen Ifill speaks of the “syndrome of the missing white woman” to define the unequal attention that some cases receive compared to the rest.
The event has also served to highlight the dissonance that in Western societies often exists between virtual and real life. Petito’s existence verged on perfection on his social networks. But despite the fact that he broadcast his day to day on Instagram or YouTube, nothing foreshadowed the fatal outcome.
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