“We feel we need to bring justice because she could have been protected that day,” Gabby Petito’s mother said Thursday.
The parents of Gabby Petito, the 22-year-old whose disappearance and murder last year spurred intense speculation, have filed a lawsuit against police in Moab, Utah, claiming that officers who pulled Petito and her boyfriend Brian Laundrie over just weeks before her death could have saved her life.
Petito’s parents, Joe Petito and Nichole Schmidt, filed a complaint Thursday in Utah stating that if Moab police had followed Utah statutes on domestic violence, Petito would still be alive today, their lawyer said during a Thursday press conference.
According to the lawsuit, the Moab officers who spoke to Petito and Laundrie in August while responding to a domestic disturbance between the two were negligent because they “failed to recognize telltale signs of domestic abuse” and misidentified Laundrie as the victim, lawyers said.
Petito’s attorneys also allege that Eric Pratt, one of the police officers who questioned Petito, was “fundamentally biased” against her because Pratt had previously threatened to kill a woman after their relationship ended, according to the Salt Lake Tribune (the allegations come from a woman who is not named in the suit, and never filed a formal complaint against Pratt).
