The father of 22-year-old homicide victim Gabby Petito on Tuesday entreated news media and the public to devote as much attention to solving the disappearances of the legions of other missing people as they have to finding his daughter.
“I want to ask everyone to help all the people that are missing and need help,” Joseph Petito told reporters during a press conference after thanking the news media and social media for spotlighting his daughter’s disappearance. “It’s on all of you, everyone that’s in this room to do that. And if you don’t do that for other people that are missing, that’s a shame, because it’s not just Gabby that deserves it.”
While not referring to the term “missing white woman syndrome” directly, his words resonated with those highlighting the lack of coverage when people of color go missing, in particular, women.
Gabby Petito disappeared last month while on a trip with her fiancé, Brian Laundrie. He came home, she didn’t. Her parents reported her missing on Sept. 11, and her body was discovered last Sunday at Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming and her death ruled a homicide. Her exact cause of death is still under investigation.
A massive manhunt is underway for Laundrie, who is now himself missing, and neither he nor his family have cooperated with authorities. On Sunday, friends and family memorialized the slain woman in Holbrook, on Long Island, where she and Laundrie had grown up.
Other recent disappearances have received far less scrutiny, a fact called out recently by Joy Reid on MSNBC’s “The ReidOut.”
In London, the murder of Sabina Nessa raised similar questions, as one column in The Independent noted, comparing the 28-year-old schoolteacher’s case to that of Sarah Everard, a marketing exec whose killing by a police officer riveted the U.K. and beyond.
While advocates emphasized that Gabby Petito’s case was horrific and deserves the coverage, they said the same goes for all missing people. Indeed, her case “should be a template for how missing person’s cases are handled in this country,” David Robinson, whose 24-year-old son, Black geologist Daniel Robinson, went missing in Arizona in June, told The Daily Beast.
With News Wire Services
