Brian Laundrie's mother Roberta has spoken out following claims that she wrote a note to her son offering to help bury a body.
Laundrie, 23, made headlines in 2021 after he embarked on a road trip with his 22-year-old fiancée Gabby Petito, eventually returning back home to Florida in September without her. He and his family went camping 75 miles from their home soon after, ignoring the Petito family's requests to help them locate their daughter, who they had since reported missing.
During their trip - in which they travelled from state to state in a camper van - the couple had been stopped by police in Utah following an apparent violent altercation.
Petito's body was found in September, with a coroner determining she'd died about three weeks earlier of "blunt-force injuries to the head and neck, with manual strangulation," per NPR. Then, just weeks later, Laundrie's body was found in a nature reserve with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. In a backpack located near his body, a notebook was found in which he described only killing Petito to put her out of her misery after she sustained an injury.
Since the discovery of both bodies, Petito's parents - Joseph Petito and Nichole Schmidt - filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Laundrie's parents. In it, they argued that the Laundrie family were not only aware that their son had murdered Petito, but that they were also in the process of helping him flee the country, The Daily Mail reported.
It was during this current lawsuit that an attorney for Petito's family, Patrick Reilly, alleged that a note from Roberta Laundrie had also been found in the backpack located near his remains, where she stated that she would "bring a shovel and bury a body." The note was also reportedly labeled: "Burn after reading," The Daily Mail reports.
"This request would also include the note that Roberta Laundrie wrote to Brian Laundrie which she offered to bring a shovel to help bury the body," Reilly said in court documents obtained by CNN. "This note was released to the custody of Mr. Bertolino on Friday, June 24, 2022 by the FBI."
"The language in that letter is damning and that letter has a reference to bringing a shovel and burying a body," Reilly added.
Roberta has since hit out at the accusations, arguing that the words and phrases she used within the letter were references to inside jokes she shared with her son - and that the note was written when her son and Petito were in a strained relationship, months before Petito was killed.
"There were some other phrases that I used in the letter, which are not found in the books I shared with Brian as a child. However, these phrases are common enough in our circle of friends and family, to describe who you could turn to in the most troubling times of your life," Roberta wrote in an affidavit obtained by the New York Post.
"While I use the words that seem to have a connection with Brian's actions and his taking Gabby's life, I never would have fathomed the events that unfolded months later between Brian and Gabby would reflect the words in my letter," she continued.
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