SALT LAKE CITY — The attorneys representing Gabby Petito’s family in a $50 million negligence lawsuit against the Moab Police Department say police ignored Petito’s visible injuries when they interviewed her and her fiancé, Brian Laundrie, weeks before she was murdered in 2021.
The law firm Parker & McConkie released a photo of Petito recovered from her cellphone on Tuesday, as new evidence in the lawsuit. Brian Stewart, an attorney with the firm, wrote that Petito took the photo of herself on Aug. 12, 2021, before she and Laundrie were stopped by police responding to a report that two people were fighting outside of a Moab grocery store.
The photograph shows blood and marks across Petito’s nose and left eye, which she had pointed to when she was interviewed by police while in the back of a squad car later in the day. Petito told the responding officers that Laundrie had grabbed her face, leaving marks with his nail, according to police body camera footage.
Stewart wrote that the photo indicates “that she was grabbed over her face in such a way that her airways were likely obstructed” and that “the seriousness and significance” of the injury was “completely ignored.” He added that the photo also makes it clear that Petito was not the “predominant aggressor” and that she was also “likely strangled and/or suffocated by Laundrie” before police arrived.
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Written by CARTER WILLIAMS, KSL.com.
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