gabby
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Post by gabby on Sept 21, 2021 11:31:12 GMT -8
The clamor over this incident is certainly regrettable in some ways. I'm trying not to get tangled up in all of it, but it's hard to do, given our lives on the internets. I have to admit that I watched the entire hour and 17 minutes of the body cam last night, but all I really got out of that was that the police officers who handled the incident were exceptional in their discretion. They should all get a medal of some sort. Anything untoward that happened afterward wasn't their fault, though, in a perfect world, there would have been better and more flexible laws (though I wouldn't want to be the police officer trying to enforce even the current inflexible Utah laws - it's the hand that's been dealt them, however regrettable), and the inclusion of more appropriately educated personnel to deal with such conflict. I watched the entire thing because I was, as usual, overly curious about the interactions involved. The short videos I saw everywhere in news stories were not really all that informative, and sometimes quite misleading. There are just way too many cameras in the world now ... www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10014097/Cops-actively-investigating-possible-sighting-Brian-Laundrie-500-miles-afrom-home.html
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Post by swmtnbackpacker on Sept 21, 2021 15:02:11 GMT -8
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BigLoad
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Post by BigLoad on Sept 21, 2021 15:18:12 GMT -8
Yeah, the boyfriend looks guilty as can be with IMHO the family as potential accomplices if they helped him slip away. The timeline looks bad for him. Even if they don't recover her cell phone, the phone company records could be illuminating, as would be records for his cell phone. I think he made at least one attempt to establish an alibi and changed that plan mid-course. The August 30 text looks like a second attempted alibi, and was quite likely sent a day or two after he had left the area.
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walkswithblackflies
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Post by walkswithblackflies on Sept 22, 2021 6:16:43 GMT -8
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Travis
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Post by Travis on Sept 22, 2021 9:10:46 GMT -8
710 Indigenous people, mostly girls, were reported missing over the past decade in Wyoming, the same state where Gabby Petito reportedly disappeared Gabby Petito was busy creating a fantasy world for her hundreds of thousands of followers before she was ever reported missing. That fantasy was of an attractive young lady visiting the natural wonders of the country with the young man she loved. They lived in a small van, yet were always clean. Money never seemed to be an obstacle. The picture was not about the price of gas or meals. It was about a romance lived to its fullest. And to perpetuate this fantasy, she had all the electronic gadgets necessary to take films and photos, process them, gain an internet connection when needed, and post all of her select evidence of happiness to multiple sites with thousands of followers. What she apparently hid is that she, like untold thousands of women, was trapped in an abusive relationship. She needed the boyfriend to portray the romance. Without that, the fantasy world failed. So she tolerated the abuse and after being repeatedly slapped around in Utah, made herself look like the aggressor when the van was pulled over by law enforcement. When I read the first news accounts of this story and about the law-enforcement man-hours that were being consumed in the search for Gabby Petito, my first thoughts were why her and not all the native children and girls gone missing from reservations. There is the obvious point that they are not blond and blue-eyed. But neither can they afford the internet connection, the van, the fuel, the digital electronics and gadgets. I’ve known or seen plenty of attractive young native women and young men who could play the part. But I can’t think of any of them that had the resources to perpetuate the fantasy world Gabby Petito strove to create for her many followers. I can’t say why this story has garnered so much attention, even from law enforcement. But neither can I see how the fantasy seemed to have so many believers. Perhaps they are not as cynical as I. Or realistic?
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Post by swmtnbackpacker on Sept 22, 2021 12:55:32 GMT -8
710 Indigenous people, mostly girls, were reported missing over the past decade in Wyoming, the same state where Gabby Petito reportedly disappeared Gabby Petito was busy creating a fantasy world for her hundreds of thousands of followers before she was ever reported missing. That fantasy was of an attractive young lady visiting the natural wonders of the country with the young man she loved. They lived in a small van, yet were always clean. Money never seemed to be an obstacle. The picture was not about the price of gas or meals. It was about a romance lived to its fullest. And to perpetuate this fantasy, she had all the electronic gadgets necessary to take films and photos, process them, gain an internet connection when needed, and post all of her select evidence of happiness to multiple sites with thousands of followers. What she apparently hid is that she, like untold thousands of women, was trapped in an abusive relationship. … I can’t say why this story has garnered so much attention, even from law enforcement. But neither can I see how the fantasy seemed to have so many believers. Perhaps they are not as cynical as I. Or realistic? Last part first. The whole vanlife thing is one of the latest in marketing (taking off in a van or RV isn’t of course). If vanlifers can get sponsored via all sorts of revenue streams (think about it: camper hardware, appliances, yoga and casual clothes, vehicle accessories, hiking/biking paraphernalia, … maybe other paraphernalia?) .. it could amount to a nice sum. Unlike the majority of affiliate-linked or bottom tiered sponsored backpackers and climbers who reportedly don’t get a lot from their efforts. It also helps having a good looking young woman in various pictures. Just someone with an inside look into marketing btw - being middle age, am not about to #vanlife, not the least breaking down in the sticks and hearing dueling banjos ( well, that’s probably not good..). Think the deceased looked younger than her years and that also pushed the story. Fwiw the FBI is offering a large reward ($10k) for info on a Native American woman who went missing.
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BigLoad
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Post by BigLoad on Sept 22, 2021 13:19:25 GMT -8
I'm dubious about fiance's 9/14 disappearance. Did his parents arrange to smuggle him out of the country and drop a car off at the reserve as a diversion?
It's hard to imagine the discussion they must have had. "The police want to know if you killed your girlfriend"
"No, I just told her I wanted to take off and she gave me the van. Oh, by the way, I'm getting bored sitting around here the last couple weeks. I think I'm going to go camp in the swamp for a while."
"OK, fine, be careful with the car."
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Hungry Jack
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Post by Hungry Jack on Sept 22, 2021 13:34:00 GMT -8
I am amazed they found her body so quickly (and saddened). Obviously, the tips made all the difference in being able to locate her.
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Post by bradmacmt on Sept 23, 2021 3:09:20 GMT -8
Gwen Ifill Was Right About ‘Missing White Woman Syndrome'
Charles M. Blow
"The breathless coverage of the disappearance and apparent killing of Gabrielle Petito has played out in a virtual — and sometimes literal — split screen alongside images of mounted officers in Texas swinging long reins like whips while herding Haitian migrants. That startling contrast forces us once again to wrestle with a crucial question: What kinds of people, in what kinds of bodies, with what kinds of lineage do we value?
I have been in journalism my entire professional life — over 30 years — and I, like many others, have seen a consistent pattern of missing white women and girls receiving outsize coverage when other missing people receive none.
In 2004, at the Unity journalists of color convention in Washington, Gwen Ifill coined the phrase “missing white woman syndrome,” joking that “if there is a missing white woman you’re going to cover that every day.”
It is not that these white women should matter less, but rather that all missing people should matter equally. Race should not determine how newsroom leaders assign coverage, especially because those decisions often lead to disproportionate allocation of government resources, as investigators try to solve the highest-profile cases.
The obsessive fascination with missing white women also leads to a slanting in sympathies. All missing-persons stories are human tragedies, and because we are all human we empathize with the people we see. But this also erases the trauma of other missing people, as if nonwhite people never go missing, when they absolutely do.
It all becomes cyclical: Media raises the profile; law enforcement engages because of that high profile; the public becomes invested; then the media continues its coverage because of the massive law enforcement response and widespread public interest.
Just like that, we have all been manipulated into playing a part in the white damsel ideology, that young white women, often attractive, are the very epitome of innocence and virtue. The devotion is nearly religious, rendering them as cherubic or angelic.
In this construct, all efforts must be made to protect them. So, what of the Indigenous women, or the Black women, or the Hispanic women who disappear? Why does society not see them as equally in need of honor and protection?
In the same way, it was shocking to see the officers on horseback evoking images of antebellum slave patrols when dealing with Haitian migrants. And you have to ask yourself: Would white migrants have been treated this way?
This is what happens when a country doesn’t see some people as fully human. It’s what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the “thingification of the Negro.”
When you don’t see a person’s full humanity you release any moral obligations to extend to that person the rights and respect given to other humans. And in this state, danger lurks. In this state, atrocities creep.
And it’s not just the Haitians. Latin American children were separated from their families, and many were forced to sleep in cold, open rooms under foil blankets with the lights turned on.
Black and brown people often get flattened into statistics, becoming a mass rather than existing as individual men, women and children. And there is real danger in this.
When I heavily covered the cases of Black people killed by the police, I would explain to the family members I was interviewing the angle of the column: I wasn’t there to litigate the cases; I was there to breathe life back into the dead bodies. I was there to render them whole, as complete human beings who loved and were loved. I was there to force my readers to see them as people.
I was there to rescue them from being just a number, to rescue them from being just another.
I understood the power of humanization, just as I recognized how many forces in society pushed dehumanization onto particular bodies.
The degree to which your humanity is restored weighs heavily on how power structures respond to you and how the public is able to empathize with you.
That is why we must interrogate our tendency to put humanity on a sliding scale: We hone our sympathies over a lifetime, and it is in all the small things — where we are having our sympathies directed — that show up in the end.
And the way we value things can be subtle and show up in places we might not expect. If you think only of European artists as the old masters and African and Indigenous art as primitive, that, too, is part of the problem. If your heart was broken when the Notre-Dame cathedral burned but you were not moved — or possibly even aware — when a fire razed the oldest science museum in Brazil (the country with the world’s second-largest Black population), destroying an irreplaceable collection amassed over centuries, then that is part of the issue.
How we value cultures and countries of origin points to how we value people. If what you value most tends to be European then the people you value most are likely to be white.
Untangle this. Unpack this. Start over. Equality of perception will lead to equality of treatment. It’s quite simple, actually. We just make it complex to disguise our deficits."
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Post by bradmacmt on Sept 23, 2021 3:24:16 GMT -8
As the Petito case grips the nation, families of color say their missing loved ones matter, too
By Brittany Shammas and Kim Bellware www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/09/22/missing-persons-families-seek-help-after-gabby-petito-death/ "The last time Kimberly Bryan spoke to her sister, Tiffany Foster was showing off her new car. Bryan cracked some jokes about how it was about time but also told her big sister how proud she was. Foster was getting close to graduating from college, and everything seemed to be lining up for her.
That was more than six months ago. Foster, a 35-year-old Black mother of three from Newnan, Ga., has not been seen or heard from since March 1.
Bryan and her family handed out fliers, spoke at news conferences and hosted rallies to draw attention to Foster’s disappearance, but the case has remained mostly unknown outside their home state. So when Bryan saw the surge of interest in the Gabby Petito case, the difference was impossible to ignore.
“It does make you feel, you know, ‘Well, what about us?’ ” Bryan said. “When are we going to get her face out nationally? When are we going to get the FBI come in and help us out? We didn’t get that, and I’m asking my mom, ‘Well, why?’ And it’s no answers. We have a lot of questions with no answers.”
In the weeks since Petito was reported missing during a cross-country trip with her fiance, her story has captured national and international attention, dominating TikTok and other social media networks and garnering around-the-clock national news coverage. Partly due to the tremendous public awareness, tips flowed to the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, and the body of the 22-year-old woman was discovered Sunday near Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park.
FBI asks public for help finding Gabby Petito’s fiance after autopsy shows she died by homicide
A manhunt for fiance Brian Laundrie, whom authorities named a “person of interest” in the case, continues. News outlets and social media users continue to track every development.
The groundswell of concern for Petito has revived perennial questions about why some missing-person cases attract such a dedicated response while others barely draw notice with many observers seeing a racial disparity at play. Between 2011 and 2020, at least 710 Indigenous people were reported missing in Wyoming, the same state where Petito, who is White, was lost and found within a matter of days.
Bryan doesn’t understand why the story of her sister, a Georgia Military College student with dreams of becoming a police officer, has not spread as widely. But, she noted, “I do feel like it could possibly be because my sister doesn’t have blond hair and blue eyes.”
Research suggests that victims who are White, attractive, young and seemingly “innocent” gain more traction in the media, said Michelle N. Jeanis, an assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette who studies the relationship between crime and news and entertainment media.
Jeanis said research indicates that the supposedly democratizing force of social media follows the same patterns of bias as in the traditional media realm, in that “individuals of color are less likely to receive likes and clicks and shares.”
As the Petito story progresses, though, the window for the conversation about racial disparities has widened to longer than a day for the first time that Jeanis can remember.
“I’m seeing a huge difference. Every time we have a high-profile White woman that goes missing, I get phone calls first about the case and then about the disparity,” she told The Washington Post. “This time it’s different; people want to talk about the disparity.”
Perhaps as a result, lesser-known missing-people cases — particularly Black and Indigenous people — have begun to see a boost. On social media, the Gabby Petito hashtag now carries posts with their names. Names such as Lauren “El” Cho, a 30-year-old musician last seen June 28 in California’s Yucca Valley; Jelani Day, a 25-year-old Illinois State University graduate student reported missing Aug. 25 from Bloomington, Ill.; and Daniel Robinson, a 24-year-old geologist who vanished from a Phoenix-area job site June 23.
Robinson’s father, David Robinson II, has spent the past three months focused on finding his son, traveling from his home in South Carolina to Arizona and hiring a private investigator. He was so consumed with rallying volunteers for search parties that he didn’t digest the news from the United States’ chaotic end to the war in Afghanistan, a conflict he served in. He didn’t know about Petito’s case until relatives texted it to him.
“My first reaction was, ‘Oh my God,’ ” Robinson said. “It hurt me to hear some other family is going through the same thing at the same time.”
Before hearing about Petito, Robinson had watched the number of people in Arizona vanish every year. “And I missed how many people of color, and Native Americans — and especially women — go missing. I had never known those things until it happened to me,” he said. “It seems we’re being somehow ignored, I guess. Like [people of color] are seen as less important.”
But in recent days, he’s noticed a sudden burst in awareness. A tweet about his son’s disappearance went viral, and more people signed a two-week-old petition calling on the Buckeye Police Department to treat the case as a criminal matter.
Donations poured into a GoFundMe campaign launched in July to help with the search effort; on Wednesday, the campaign shot past its goal with more than 1,000 new donations in the prior 24 hours. It couldn’t have come at a better time for Robinson, who had run out of funds and was making the painful decision to return to South Carolina.
“I was really hurting. I was prepared to leave,” he said, “but I want to be here for my son.”
A throng of Internet sleuths are on the Gabby Petito case. Why has it sparked so much interest?
Like Robinson, Seve Day was immersed in coordinating social media campaigns and search efforts for his brother Jelani to absorb the fire hose of coverage from the Petito case. When he saw how quickly the FBI jumped into her case and how much national attention it received, the comparison to his family’s struggle for attention and resources stung: Day has been missing for a month with no breakthroughs. A body was discovered Sept. 5 near the area where Day’s empty car was found, but officials said a backlog would delay a positive identification.
On Wednesday, Seve Day said his family was still waiting on word. Although Petito’s search did not end with her found alive, Day wished for certainty at least.
“This is a common issue that [we] as minorities have faced for a long time: Whenever it comes to getting equal energy for a situation — and in this case, trying to find my brother — the same efforts and attention is hard for us to get,” Day said.
Among those trying to build awareness of the case is Haley Toumaian. The 24-year-old Los Angeles-area data analyst drew a following of hundreds of thousands of people by posting TikTok videos about Petito’s story. With part of that case cracked, she pledged to highlight others, focusing especially on people of color.
She posted videos about Robinson and Day on Tuesday, urging her followers to share information about their cases.
“With the Gabby Petito case, I realized how many people I could reach, and I didn’t want to just stop there,” Toumaian said in an interview. “I really think that the power of social media can potentially help find other people.”
She was missing for months, surviving on grass and moss. Police found her when a drone crashed.
Bryan said she’s noticed a little more attention being paid to her sister’s case, and she has started appealing to social media influencers to talk about her sister. She tells them, “Hey, you have a lot of followers — can you post my sister’s flier? Can you ask your followers if they’ve seen her?”
Over the past six months, her family has learned “bits and pieces” about her disappearance. The Coweta County Sheriff’s Office reported that Foster, who also goes by Tiffany Starks, was last known to be headed out shopping. Days after Bryan last heard from her, her car was found with her wallet and keys inside. Foster’s fiance, Reginald Robertson, was criminally charged for moving the vehicle, according to local media. He has not been named a suspect in her disappearance.
It’s been a hard six months for the family. Foster’s children have been staying with relatives; her 15-year-old daughter recently got her first job, and, Bryan said, “That’s something that she should be able to share with her mom.”
She said part of her worries that so much time has passed, the case will go unsolved. But, she added, “I don’t feel if the shoe was on the other foot that she would give up on me. And I’m not going to do that for her.”
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Hungry Jack
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Post by Hungry Jack on Sept 23, 2021 8:07:41 GMT -8
Here in Chicago, it seems every other day brings a story of a shooting in one of the poor neighborhoods south or west of downtown where a child is an innocent victim of a bullet intended for some other target. The stories are heartbreaking. But I notice that, after hearing these so frequently, a certain acceptance of it being normalized sometimes creeps in. I hear it on the news and sometimes think "Jeez. Another one." It's really a terrible problem here.
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walkswithblackflies
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Post by walkswithblackflies on Sept 23, 2021 8:57:27 GMT -8
Gwen Ifill coined the phrase “missing white woman syndrome,” PRETTY YOUNG missing white woman syndrome {And now that I think of it, I can't recall a single media story associated with a missing male.}
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gabby
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Post by gabby on Sept 23, 2021 9:23:40 GMT -8
Most of what you guys is saying is true, but, hell, it's "marketing 101". You can't sell roach bait w/o a semi-naked woman in the ad.
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Travis
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Post by Travis on Sept 23, 2021 15:04:27 GMT -8
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driftwoody
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Take the path closer to the edge, especially if less traveled
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Post by driftwoody on Sept 23, 2021 15:13:34 GMT -8
But I notice that, after hearing these so frequently, a certain acceptance of it being normalized sometimes creeps in. I hear it on the news and sometimes think "Jeez. Another one." Yep. I see these kind of stories so frequently reading the morning Trib that I generally move on after reading the first couple sentences. Does that constitute a devaluing of the victim's life? There are too many such tragedies to immerse oneself into constant sorrow. The best we can do is support solutions to the ongoing carnage, discussion of which leads quickly to TPA.
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