Inside Gabby Petito’s perfect Long Island life before moving to Florida with Brian

Gabby Petito’s tragic story has captured the world once again after Netflix’s new American Murder documentary, but it only briefly covers her upbringing.

The 22-year-old was born on Long Island and lived there until 2019, when she moved to Florida to live with her boyfriend Brian Laundrie, and his parents.

She was then devastatingly killed by Brian in August 2021 while they were travelling across the United States in a van and vlogging it for YouTube.

Here are all the details about Gabby’s upbringing that the documentary left out.

Credit: Netflix

Gabby Petito was born on Long Island

Gabby was born in Blue Point, New York on March 19, 1999. It’s a pretty expensive and affluent area in Suffolk County that’s considered very safe, with not much going on.

After her parents amicably split, she lived with her mum Nichole Schmidt and stepdad Jim Schmidt, but was also close to her dad Joseph Petito, and stepmum Tara Petito.

Her mum was a teacher’s assistant and her dad worked as a warehouse store chain manager. She has six siblings in total, including one full sibling and five half-siblings.

Credit: Netflix

She met Brian Laundrie at high school

Gabby went to Bayport-Blue Point High School in Bayport, New York, which is where she met Brian. They started dating in March 2019 when he was a junior and she was a sophomore.

He grew up on Long Island too, less than two miles from Gabby Petito’s house, but they were from completely different worlds.

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She lived in a stunning luxury waterfront property while his parents had a pretty average home. The two neighbourhoods are literally split in half by train tracks.

Brian’s parents moved to North Port, Florida, in around 2017. However, Gabby and Brian didn’t join them until a few years later.

Credit: Bayport-Blue Point High School

They moved to Florida together

From September 2017 to January 2019, Gabby lived in Carolina Beach, North Carolina where she worked as a hostess in a restaurant after finishing high school.

She applied to go to Cape Fear Community College but never ended up attending as she moved to Florida to live with Brian’s family in 2019.

They had only been dating for a few months and she uprooted her entire life to North Port, where they worked at Publix together.

Gabby was a pharmacy technician and he was in the grocery department. However, they quit their jobs during the Covid-19 pandemic to go travelling together. 

Their first trip was a drive from New York to California from late 2019 to early 2020. The couple got engaged around a month after the trip.

In December 2020, she then bought the converted Ford Transit van and they left for their second trip on July 2, 2021, where Gabby was tragically murdered.

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Featured image by: Netflix