Petito and Laundrie traffic stop location

This is the exact location where the police stopped Gabby Petito (22) and Brian Laundrie (23) following a domestic disturbance incident.

It is situated on Arches National Park Road in Moab, Utah.

Bodycam footage of the stop gained worldwide attention after Petito went missing roughly two weeks later.

At approximately 4.30 p.m. on Thursday, August 12th, 2021, a member of the public called 911 after they saw Laundrie and Petito engaged in a physical altercation outside the Moonflower Community Cooperative in Moab, Utah.

The caller said that they witnessed a man hitting a woman twice. A separate individual named "Chris" saw the woman punching the man in the arm.

Fifteen minutes later, the police spotted the couple's white Ford Transit van driving erratically on the main entrance road to Arches National Park.

They pulled the van over at this section of the road near the park's headquarters.

During the stop, the officers separated Laundrie and Petito and interviewed them for more than an hour.

Petito admitted that she hit Laundrie while he was driving. She also said that he had grabbed her face.

Laundrie did not admit to hitting Petito. Instead, he claimed that he had merely tried to push her away because she was "getting worked up."

Petito's admission meant that the police would have had to arrest her for domestic violence, not Laundrie.

However, it appears as though they were very reluctant to do so. To avoid pressing charges, they offered the couple a compromise: they would let the incident go if they both agreed to separate and spend the night at different locations.

It later came to light that the officers failed to track down the original 911 caller. An internal investigation by the Moab Police Department found that they had mistakenly identified "Chris" as being the caller.

One of the officers wrote in his report that nobody had seen Laundrie hitting Petito, even though the original 911 caller said otherwise. He also failed to include the remark about Laundrie grabbing her by the face.

The internal investigation concluded that the officers needed additional training to deal with domestic violence incidents. It noted that grabbing someone by the face is an "extremely personal, violent, and controlling act." If the officers had received better training, they may have realized the significance of such an act and deduced that Laundrie was possibly the primary, long-term aggressor.

The traffic stop didn't become significant until after Petito's mother reported her missing on September 11th, 2021. By that point, more than two weeks had passed since the 22-year-old was last seen in public.

On September 19th, police officers discovered Petito's body near a creek in Wyoming. She had been beaten and strangled to death.

Although the traffic stop was heavily criticized, it is unknown whether an arrest would have significantly altered the course of events that ultimately led to Petito's murder.