Gabby Petito’s father Joe and his wife Tara reveal what happened to their daughter’s van after her 2021 murder by fiancé Brian Laundrie.
Gabby Petito‘s parents are keeping her memory alive.
Almost four years after Joe Petito and his wife Tara Petito lost their daughter in a brutal murder at the hands of her fiancé Brian Laundrie, Joe and Tara are sharing what they did with the sprinter van that Gabby and Brian had been traveling in before their deaths.
“We crushed the van,” Joe told NewsNation Monday in an interview with Brian Entin. “We didn’t want the van to be out there, someone owning it and, ‘Here’s the van that Gabby was–‘ you know.”
The declaration came as Joe and Tara were showing Entin a memory cabinet in their home filled with memories of Gabby. Included in the cabinet were items from inside her van, as well as pieces of the actual van they saved before crushing the vehicle.
Instagram/FBI
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Showing the circular piece of white metal they saved to the cameras, the couple revealed it was a piece from the van with a sticker on it that read, “Let’s get lost,” above a mountain scene. “Here we actually took her gas tank,” Tara explained.
The heartbreaking revelation comes as Joe and Tara, as well as Gabby’s mother Nichole Schmidt and stepdad Joe Schmidt, detail their daughter’s disappearance and murder in the new Netflix docuseries, American Murder: Gabby Petito, which looks further into Brian and Gabby’s toxic relationship.
After both Gabby and Brian went missing in late summer 2021, federal investigators concluded Brian killed Gabby, whose cause of death was ruled a homicide caused by manual strangulation and blunt-force trauma to her head and neck.
Winona County Detention Center/Winona Police Department/Instagram
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Brian’s remains were discovered not long after in October, his death ruled a suicide from a gunshot wound to the head.
Following Brian’s death, Gabby’s family filed a wrongful death suit against Brian’s estate and were awarded $3 million in 2022.
Another suit was filed against his parents, who refused to cooperate with Gabby’s family and authorities following her disappearance, for intentional and reckless infliction of emotional distress. That suit was settled in February 2024.
For more on Gabby’s story, check out American Murder: Gabby Petito, currently streaming on Netflix.
