Partial human remains found in a Florida wilderness area have been identified through dental records as belonging to Brian Laundrie, the boyfriend of murdered travel blogger Gabby Petito, the FBI said on Thursday.
The remains were discovered on Wednesday in the swampy Carlton Reserve, not far from Laundrie’s parents’ home. Police and FBI agents had been searching for him there since his family reported him missing in the middle of last month.
Laundrie had been named a “person of interest” in Petito’s disappearance, but was never criminally charged in her murder.
Photo: Reuters
A federal grand jury in Wyoming indicted him on Sept. 23 on a single count of fraudulently using her bank debit card.
Petito’s disappearance in late August during a cross-country “van life” road trip with Laundrie was followed closely in US media, as the case became an Internet sensation and then a tabloid mystery.
Petito, 22, was last been seen alive on Aug. 26. Her body was discovered on Sept. 19 near the remote Spread Creek Dispersed Campground in Bridger-Teton National Forest in western Wyoming. Medical examiners found she had been strangled.
Her remains were found less than 300m from where, on the evening of Aug. 27, another pair of travel bloggers caught video images of the couple’s 2012 white Ford Transit van parked along a dirt road.
Petito and Laundrie, who lived with Laundrie’s parents in North Port on Florida’s west coast, embarked on their trip in early July from New York’s Long Island, where they had both attended high school.
As they traveled through Kansas, Colorado, Utah and points west, Petito documented their trip on social media with videos and pictures that depicted a loving couple on a US adventure.
On Aug. 12, a 911 caller reported that Laundrie was slapping and hitting Petito in front of the Moonflower Community Cooperative in Moab, Utah.
Moab police stopped the van on a highway near Arches National Park. Body camera footage showed Petito crying as she described an argument that escalated into her slapping Laundrie as he drove. The officers did not detain the couple, but told them to spend the night apart.
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
Cook Islands officials yesterday said they had discussed seabed minerals research with China as the small Pacific island mulls deep-sea mining of its waters. The self-governing country of 17,000 people — a former colony of close partner New Zealand — has licensed three companies to explore the seabed for nodules rich in metals such as nickel and cobalt, which are used in electric vehicle (EV) batteries. Despite issuing the five-year exploration licenses in 2022, the Cook Islands government said it would not decide whether to harvest the potato-sized nodules until it has assessed environmental and other impacts. Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown
STEADFAST DART: The six-week exercise, which involves about 10,000 troops from nine nations, focuses on rapid deployment scenarios and multidomain operations NATO is testing its ability to rapidly deploy across eastern Europe — without direct US assistance — as Washington shifts its approach toward European defense and the war in Ukraine. The six-week Steadfast Dart 2025 exercises across Bulgaria, Romania and Greece are taking place as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches the three-year mark. They involve about 10,000 troops from nine nations and represent the largest NATO operation planned this year. The US absence from the exercises comes as European nations scramble to build greater military self-sufficiency over their concerns about the commitment of US President Donald Trump’s administration to common defense and
RSS