Arches park ranger warned Gabby Petito her relationship with Brian Laundrie seemed ‘toxic’
Hulls detailed the complexing, difficult — and often scrutinized — relationship between law enforcement and domestic violence situations. Sometimes the choice is clear, and knowing the victim is in imminent danger can make the responding officer’s job easier. But it’s not always black and white.
“Sometimes you get evidence and they don’t own up to it, and they’re just lying to your face and it’s unsafe, and you know that something more is going to happen if you let them go home together. That’s a much easier decision to arrest,” she said. “With this one, I just don’t think she understood how big a deal this was.”
So they separated the couple. Petito took the van, Laundrie was taken to a hotel, and a few days later, they were back on the road, headed north to Salt Lake City.
Excellent find, thank you.
"Hulls arrived to find the couple pulled over by a Moab police officer inside the park. Knowing that in a domestic violence situation the female usually feels more comfortable talking with another female, she focused on Petito, who at that point was sitting in the back of a police cruiser.
“I can still hear her voice,” Hulls said in an exclusive interview with the Deseret News. “She wasn’t just a face on the milk carton, she was real to me.”
Hulls pictures the sobbing 22-year-old sitting in the back of the cruiser. She knows her mannerisms, just from the roughly hour-and-a half interaction.
“I was probably more candid with her than I should've been,” Hulls recalls, warning Petito that her and Laundrie’s relationship had the markings of a “toxic” one.
“I was imploring with her to reevaluate the relationship, asking her if she was happy in the relationship with him, and basically saying this was an opportunity for her to find another path, to make a change in her life,” she said.
“She had a lot of anxiety about being away from him, I honestly thought if anything was going to change it would be after they got home to Florida.”
In the end, Petito stayed with Laundrie.
“This wasn't a good day for anybody. We thought we were making the right decision when we left them.”"
... Sounds to me like both Brian and Gabby did a good job of sounding
compos mentis, plus it's tough to make the decision to arrest one or the other of a couple who's basically begging for neither of the other to be arrested, I would imagine.
