Gabby Petito's family responds to missing white woman syndrome

Gabby Petito's name first appeared in headlines across the country and around the world when the aspiring YouTube blogger disappeared while on a cross-country trip with her fiancé Brian Laundrie, 23, in summer 2021.

The desperate search for Gabby, 22, began after her worried parents filed a missing person's report on Sept. 11 after more than a week of failed attempts to contact her, and ended eight days later when her body was discovered near a campground in Wyoming. Her death was ruled a homicide by a coroner, who determined she had died of “manual strangulation” at least three weeks earlier.

Laundrie, who committed suicide, was found in a nature preserve near his family's home in North Port, Florida, on October 20, with a backpack containing what the FBI described as a notebook “claiming responsibility” for Gabby’s death.

Some activists and journalists responded to the attention garnered by Petito's case by saying it represented “missing white woman syndrome” – in which white victims of crime receive more public attention than non-white victims. White.

The sentence initially upset Joe Petito, who quickly realized that it touched on a sad truth. “There is a hierarchy when it comes to sharing missing persons fliers,” he told PEOPLE. “Children come first, then white women, and lastly women of color.”

In an effort to change that, the Gabby Petito Foundation has championed the work of the Black and Missing Foundation and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, as well as the National Domestic Violence Hotline – to which they donated $100,000 in 2022 to help build the capacity of the group.

“We want to help all the missing people,” says Joe. “If the media doesn't continue to do this for everyone, it's a shame because Gabby isn't the only one who deserves this.”

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In recent months, Joe Petito and his wife Tara, along with Gabby's mother Nichole Schmidt and her husband Jim, began using their platform to raise awareness about the thousands of unsolved murders of Indigenous people whose cases rarely attract attention. media attention.

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During their recent appearance at CrimeCon, their family invited Vangie Randall-Shorty, 49, to speak about her efforts to bring attention to the unsolved 2020 murder of her 23-year-old son, Zachariah, in a Navajo reservation in New Mexico.

“Their support means a lot to me and all other families like mine,” says Randall-Shorty, who has spent years trying to get investigators to do more to bring her son's killer to justice. “It gives me so much hope.”

Zachariah's story is just one of many cases involving wasting Native Americans. According to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, there are some 4,200 unsolved cases of disappearances and murders involving indigenous people. “This is not a crisis, this is genocide,” says activist and lawyer Darlene Gomez, who works pro bono on the cases of murdered and missing indigenous women and their loved ones in New Mexico.

“In general, Native Americans don't get justice. Because if you look at the number of murdered indigenous women and their loved ones, including boys, men and children, as well as our transgender and LGBT community, with Native Americans being such a small population, the number of missing far exceeds that of any other nationality. .”

Gomez, whose childhood friend Melissa Montoya, 42, disappeared in 2001 on the Jicarilla Apache Nation, says she finds hope not in law enforcement but in communities, advocates and families who defend themselves.

“Every day, if we can get one story out and if we can get justice for one family at a time, that’s what I hope for every day.” »

Anyone with information about Zachariah's murder is asked to contact the FBI at (505) 889-1300 or go online to tips.fbi.gov.