FLORIDA – Federal investigators returned to Brian Laundrie’s family home Sunday to retrieve personal items in order to collect DNA samples, a lawyer for the family confirmed to NBC News.
The search for Gabby Petito’s fiancé intensified last week after his disappearance and after the FBI named him a person of interest in the case for the young woman’s death. Laundrie lost track of her just over a week ago after she told her family she would be hiking in a sprawling Florida nature preserve.
Petito and Laundrie embarked on an overland trip that they documented on social media, which ended when he returned home to Florida without her. The young woman’s parents reported her missing and in the interim evidence emerged of an altercation between the couple. Shortly thereafter, the woman’s body was found in Wyoming, and Laundrie’s whereabouts remain unknown.
CONTINUE THE SEARCH
Laundrie is under a federal arrest warrant that does not implicate him in the death of Petito, whose case has been declared a homicide, but does allow the police to have the power to detain him on the charge of debit card fraud.
Reports from law enforcement officials tasked with finding Laundrie were on hiatus during the weekend the Petito family said their last goodbye to Gabbi in New York. Still on Sunday, as hundreds of people paid their respects at a public memorial service on Long Island, FBI officials were seen returning to Brian Laundrie’s family home in Blue Point.
Learn the key dates of the disappearance of the young woman after a walk with her fiancé through several states in the west of the country.
“The FBI requested some personal items belonging to Brian Laundrie to help them with the DNA match and Brian’s parents provided the FBI with what they could,” an attorney for the Laundrie family said in a statement.
It is unclear what events have occurred in the last 36 hours since local officials announced the conclusion of their fourth day of searching a Florida nature preserve. A police spokesman confirmed that the search would continue through the weekend, but acknowledged that the workforce dedicated to finding Laundrie was diverting resources from other cases.
It has also not been established how long researchers plan to keep looking for Laundrie in this particular area, or where they might be looking for him next if they don’t find him there.
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