The autopsy must still be conducted and fiancé Brian Laundrie must still be found. But the tragedy of missing YouTuber Gabby Petito increasingly looks like a completely avoidable act of foul play.
Not two weeks before the last sighting of Petito, police officers in Moab, Utah, stopped the couple, who had been traversing the country by van, in the midst of a domestic dispute sufficiently intense that a witness called 911. The caller claimed that Laundrie had hit Petito twice. Rather than file any charges and ensure Petito’s safety, the officers arranged for Laundrie to spend the night in a hotel and left the clearly distraught Petito to spend the night alone in the van.
Now, Petito is missing and presumed dead. Laundrie, who was allowed to go free by police despite his refusal to comply with the initial investigation into her disappearance, is a person of interest in the case.
The case provides a clear intersection between police malfeasance of the sort that motivates Black Lives Matter protests and disregard for the abuse of women that motivates the #MeToo movement.
Instead, the dumbest person on cable news decided to make it about race. Because, of course.
MSNBC’s Joy Ann Reid: Media reporting Gabby Petito’s disappearance/presumed murder is symptom of “Missing White Woman Syndrome.” pic.twitter.com/UYAWgaDyYr
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 21, 2021
It is true that when Laci Peterson and Natalee Holloway went missing nearly two decades ago, the media went nuts. The coverage was biased, especially by magazine editors and the heads of a handful of news networks. These were young white women whom they believed the country would care more about than the typically nonwhite victims of violent crime.
The media really milked the Holloway case in particular as part of a moral panic. They wanted to turn every party girl in a warm-water location into a potential murder victim.
But the Petito case is nothing like this. For starters, it’s social media, not traditional media, that made Petito’s presumptive death a national news story. A nation gripped by true-crime documentaries and podcasts turned Petito’s disappearance into a social media investigation.
Petito documented her travels for nearly a million Instagram followers and 70,000 YouTube followers to see. Her audience was by no means large compared to top social media influencers, but she was “internet-famous” — certainly a big enough deal that social media sleuths set out to follow the breadcrumbs.
And the social media hype around Petito’s disappearance wound up converging with law enforcement’s failures in handling the case. By piecing together footage from across the internet, two YouTubers discovered the location of the corpse presumed to be Petito’s before law enforcement did. In other words, YouTubers may have solved a murder of another YouTuber before law enforcement — law enforcement that may have allowed the murder to happen. That’s a massive scandal with implications that cross all partisan leanings.
So, naturally, Joy Reid decided to make it about race.
As John Walsh, the former host of “America’s Most Wanted,” noted to Anderson Cooper on CNN, the bodycam footage from that Moab encounter illustrated “classic domestic abuse” on Laundrie’s part. The officers should have never let Laundrie go free while leaving a defenseless and distraught young woman to sleep alone in a van. Even without charging Laundrie, police reform proponents like Reid ought to note that the officers could have and should have offered Petito the chance to calm down. They should have offered her access to domestic violence resources, mental health assistance, and legal guidance on how (for example) to file a restraining order.
Instead of using this tragedy to initiate a productive discussion about how to make law enforcement more effective in #MeToo situations, Reid used a girl’s presumptive death as a race-based partisan cudgel because, quite frankly, that’s all she’s capable of.
