Report: Utah Officer who Pulled over Gabby 'Devastated' at Death

The police officer who pulled Gabby Petito and Brian Laundrie over weeks before Petito was found strangled to death in Wyoming said he is “devastated” by her death and “would have done anything to stop it,” according to a recently released report on the interaction between the couple and officers.

Officer Eric Pratt was one of multiple police who spoke with the couple after a caller reported seeing Laundrie hit Petito. After pulling over the couple’s van, police decided to separate the pair for the night. But in the weeks that followed, Petito went missing, setting off a vast search that ultimately turned up her body near Grand Teton National Park. Laundrie was missing for weeks before his family and investigators found him dead in a Florida nature preserve.

“We’re all doing this with the fact in our mind that we know what happened later,” Pratt said. “I’m desperately f***ed over that she got killed. I really am. I would have done anything to stop it if I would have known that was coming.”

The 100-page independent report on how Moab police handled the dispute between the 23-year-old Laundrie and 22-year-old Petito found that officers “made several unintentional mistakes” during the interaction, but that they overall had shown “respect and empathy” to the people involved.

Brandon Ratcliffe, the captain of the Price City Police Department who conducted the investigation of the officers’ actions, concluded that police failed to cite Petito for domestic violence after discovering she had hit Laundrie, and that mistakes in their handling of the case stemmed from that decision.

In domestic violence cases, Ratcliffe said, often the victim gets to a breaking point where they defend themselves, sometimes resulting in police being called. But the officers needed to act based on what they knew at the time, regardless of “personal feelings” or past history of the relationship, he said.

“It’s very likely Gabby was a long-term victim of domestic violence,” Ratcliffe found.

Ratcliffe made a number of recommendations for how the police department could handle similar calls going forward, including providing additional training for domestic violence incidents and legal training to ensure police understand state laws.

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