Home International Gabby Petito case embodies dark side of lockdown

Gabby Petito case embodies dark side of lockdown

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independent.ie– For many who saw the wall-to-wall coverage of the death of Gabby Petito, a 22-year-old American woman whose remains were found at the edge of a national park in Wyoming last week, the question was: “Why?”

Thousands of people, many of them children, go missing every year in the US, and many of them are later quietly reported dead.

The fevered interest in Petito — the New York Times was one of a number of organisations that held live briefings on the case throughout the past week — seemed to shine an uncomfortable light on a media obsessed with attractive white female victims.

As reporters roamed the American Northwest looking for clues, disconsolate black families held up photos of missing loved ones for PBS cameras, and Gwen Ifill, an American journalist who moderated the 2004 and 2008 presidential debates, appeared on MSNBC to say it was a clear case of what she called “missing white woman syndrome”.

But race and the base hunger for a photogenic victim weren’t the only factors that spurred such intense interest in the case.

The media were, in fact, riding on the coat-tails of a groundswell of amateur sleuths who, like Petito herself, documented every discovery online, in real time. There was so much in the short life and death of this young woman that made her story an irresistible modern parable, one that highlighted the gulf between social media fantasy and grim reality. It unfolded like a real-life Black Mirror episode.

Petito and her fiance, Brian Laundrie, were doing what most of us dreamed. After enduring the endless boredom and stasis of lockdown, they were cutting loose, taking their savings — Petito had worked as a pharmacy technician — and putting them into the trip of a lifetime, a cross-country camper van odyssey they would document on Instagram and TikTok for their friends and families back home.

The trip began in New York, where Petito grew up, last July 2, and the footage they released over the following weeks were snapshots of bohemian exuberance, her playfully riding him piggyback, the couple eating takeaway food on a beach, kissing at a crossroads while a bridge twinkled in the evening sun behind them.

Even before their disappearance, they were something of a social media sensation, with thousands of online followers vicariously living their adventures on the road.

But soon there would be other contributors to their video essay. About six weeks into their trip, police were called to their van, which had pulled up in Moab, Utah.

The person who had made the 911 call told the dispatcher he had seen the couple arguing loudly, that Laundrie had struck Petito and that she, in turn, had struck her fiance on the arm.

The police later caught up with Petito and Laundrie, and bodycam footage from that stop shows she was extremely tearful and distressed; she told police she was struggling with “personal issues”.

Laundrie told police the incident had stemmed from the pressure of living together in close confinement, and he showed them scratches on his face and arm. The police later said they considered filing domestic violence charges against her.

Although Petito did not want them to be separated, police arranged for Laundrie to spend the night at a local motel while she would sleep in the camper van.

There is now an official investigation into why police responders categorised the incident as being related to mental health and not domestic violence.

Over the following weeks, through late August, there were numerous sightings of the couple. They argued with staff at a restaurant in Wyoming, with Petito later returning to the restaurant to tearfully apologise for Laundrie’s behaviour. Their van was sighted at a forest park in the same state a few days later and footage of it was later uploaded to YouTube.

One woman, Jessica Schulz, said she reported a “slow-moving white van”, driven by a man “acting weird”, to the FBI around the same time, and she later posted about this on the social media streaming platform TikTok.

Another woman, Miranda Baker, also posted to TikTok, saying she and her boyfriend met Laundrie hitch-hiking alone on August 29. He told them he had been travelling around the country with his fiancee and claimed Petito was working on a social media page back at the van.

In fact, Petito’s final social media posting had been made on Instagram four days previously, on August 24; it showed a mural outside a restaurant in Utah.

In the days after that, text messages continued to arrive from Petito’s phone to her family, but her mother was sceptical as to whether they were really from her daughter (in one, the text referred to Petito’s grandfather by his first name, which she had never done).

Investigators know Laundrie travelled to Florida, where he had grown up, without Petito early this month. On September 11, her family reported her as a missing person. On September 14, Laundrie’s family home in Florida was searched, and the following day he was declared a “person of interest” in Petito’s disappearance.

As a candlelit vigil grew outside the parents’ house, Laundrie himself somehow escaped — leaving behind his credit card and wallet — and his parents filed their own missing person’s report. State police and the FBI are currently conducting a manhunt. Laundrie has already been indicted for “attempt to defraud” for the unauthorised use of Petito’s credit card after her death.

Meanwhile, the case has become an obsession around the world. Petito’s stricken father took part in a press conference last week, in which he said the “only thing” that mattered was finding out what exactly happened to his daughter.

For that man, finding himself at the centre of a media circus at what is without doubt the most painful moment of his life, must seem particularly unjust. Like the campaigners for missing black youths, he must wonder why the glare of press and public attention must bear down on this one case.

But each of us has only a limited range of empathy, and without personally knowing the protagonists, it is the themes they represent that mesmerise:
a young-and-in-love couple making a break for it in a camper van seemed to embody an aspirational post-lockdown fantasy.

Their fights, exacerbated by the confined quarters they lived in (even with the open road stretching ahead of them), seem emblematic of the domestic violence epidemic ignited by Covid. The police response symbolised the lack of a proper response.

The legion of amateur detectives who nudged the case along with their TikTok posts seemed like the culmination of a decade of true crime obsession.

The whole thing was a story that seemed to move on and offline, with rumour, supposition and fantasy outstriding reality at every turn.

These, more than Petito’s race and gender, are the themes that mainlined this case into the headlines, and they echo far beyond America. The world could not look away.

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