‘PLEASE FIND HER’
LI parents’ plea for gal who vanished on trip with beau
The parents of a Long Island woman who vanished while on a cross-country trip with her boyfriend are pleading for help to get her back home safely.
Gabby Petito, 22, who was reported missing by her family on Saturday, was believed to have been last seen in Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming late last month.
Her mother, Nicole Schmidt, said she spoke to her daughter at least three times a week during the trip, with their last chat around Aug. 23.
She received a final text from Petito’s phone on Aug. 30, but has not heard from her since and suspects that the message was not sent by her.
Speaking at a press conference in her lawyer’s Suffolk County office on Monday, the mother said she had not lost hope.
“I believe a mother’s instinct is the most powerful,” Schmidt said. “I don’t know. I believe she’s going to come home.”
“I think she was just the type of person that was free. She went to be where the day took her. She didn’t have a plan. This was a plan, but what was next we didn’t know.”
Petito took off on the road trip out west with her boyfriend, Brian Laundrie, on July 2. The pair were due to end up Portland, Ore., around Halloween.
Petito documented her travels on an Instagram account, @bizarre_design.
“All the places it’s brought us so far have been amazing!” she wrote in a July 10 post. “As soon as we got to the Great Sand Dunes I didn’t want to leave, there was so much to hike!”
Schmidt said she and her husband felt comforted knowing that their daughter would be with Laundrie on the coast-tocoast journey.
“As a mom, I had concerns about a daughter going on a road trip in general,” she said. “But I felt safe. They were together.”
“They had a plan, an itinerary, and we were excited for them,” she added. “Everyone wanted to be doing what they were doing.”
But Schmidt worried when several days passed without a word from the two travelers, so she called police.
The white 2012 Ford Transit van with Florida plates that the couple had been traveling in was recovered, but without any sign of Petito.
Laundrie has since returned to their home in Florida, but has lawyered up and is refusing to cooperate with authorities, the Daily Mail reported.
On Monday, police in North Port, Fla., said they were “actively assisting” cops in Suffollk County and noted that the circumstances of Petito’s disappearance were “odd.”
“We currently have no definitive information that a crime took place here in North Port or anywhere,” the North Port Police Department said in a statement.
“With that said, the circumstances are odd. So we are actively gathering local details and evidence to assist in finding needed answers.”
Meanwhile, Schmidt and her husband, Joe Petito, said at their
press conference on Monday
that they just want their daughter back.
“I want to keep the focus on finding [Gabby],” Joe Petito told The Post. “[Laundrie] doesn’t matter. The van doesn’t matter.
“Don’t focus on the crap, focus on finding her. I can’t implore that enough. All of the crap afterward will sort itself out. Please find her. I beg you.”
Speaking at the law office of family attorney Richard Stafford in Bohemia, Petito directed an appeal to his daughter.
“Gabby, we just want you to come home,” he said. “Call us. Let us know you’re OK. Come home, please.”
The couple declined to comment on most questions from reporters, at one point referring to investigators in the case.
The press conference came after the couple emerged from a closed-door interview with a crew from “Inside Edition.”
Meanwhile, a GoFundMe page set up to assist the family had raised more than $19,000 as of late Monday.
The page says the family is working with the FBI and “multiple law enforcement agencies” to locate their daughter.
It also says she has a has a tattoo of a triangle with flowers on her left arm and the slogan “Let it be” tattooed on her right arm.