FAIRMONT – Gabby Petito was distraught and crying that August afternoon in 2021 in Moab, Utah, when and where police had just pulled her van over for speeding.
Officers observed tenseness between Petito and her boyfriend Brian Laundrie.
The couple confessed that they had been in an argument as the blue lights appeared in their rear view mirror – and that had been arguing long before, even.
She and Laundrie were traveling across the country and Petito was chronicling the journey for social media.
Rather than issuing a domestic violence citation or investigating further, authorities ordered the couple to separate for the night – a decision that would prove fatal.
A month later, Petito’s body was found in Wyoming. The 22-year-old had been strangled to death. A month after that, Laundrie’s remains were discovered in a wooded area near the home of his parents in Florida.
The autopsy revealed he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
In a handwritten note found near his body, he said Petito was seriously injured in a fall and that he “ended her life” out of mercy.
Petito’s mother, Nichole Schmidt, and stepmother Tara Petito have been traveling the country since to talk about the shadow of domestic violence on behalf of the Gabby Petito Foundation, which the family founded after the woman’s death.
Fairmont State University is hosting them at 6 p.m. Monday at Colebank Hall on the Locust Avenue campus in Fairmont.
They’ll tell their daughter and stepdaughter’s story while also detailing red flags in domestic violence experiences and offering ways to prevent or stop such incidents. Admission is free.
In West Virginia and the nation, domestic violence is a tale that always gets told.
During the period of 2020-2024, more than 1 million victims of domestic violence came forth across the nation, according to numbers culled in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program.
Nearly 75% of the victims were female.
Across that same span, the report notes, there were 11,000 or so murder victims of domestic violence.
Schmidt said in hindsight while she wasn’t sure anything could have been done to save her daughter from a “messy and violent relationship” – one that ultimately ended in death – there is at least now a beacon of awareness through the foundation that bears Gabby’s name.
Empowerment, too, she said.
“I think Gabby’s story touched a lot of people and she’s saving lives,” the mom recounted in a recent interview with Associated Press.
“I get people messaging me all the time that they were inspired by her to get out of a relationship.”
Virginia Hopkins, meanwhile, has officially been in the business of bad relationships since 1973.
That was the year she helped found the Rape and Domestic Violence Information Center in Morgantown, which advocates for victims and their families. The organization was the first of its kind in West Virginia.
A high mark for RDVIC came three years later in 1976, when, after intense lobbying by Hopkins and others, it became a crime on the books for someone to commit a sexual offense against their spouse.
“It’s not unusual for a perpetrator to get in a person’s head to try and convince that ‘they asked for it,’” Hopkins said.
“Or that they were drinking or somehow deserved to be treated like this,” she continued.
“We want to convince everyone that is not the case – and there are individuals who care about them and will see that they get the services they need.”
