Brian Laundrie took idyllic family bicycle rides and acted like he didn’t have a care in the world in the weeks when murdered girlfriend Gabby Petito was missing, according to a horrified Florida neighbor.
“Everything was just normal life once he came back,” Charlene Guthrie told Fox News of the time Laundrie, 23, returned to his family’s home without Long Island native Petito on Sept. 1.
“He mowed the lawn. [He] and his mother went for a bicycle ride around the block,” said Guthrie, who lives across the street from the Laundries in North Port.
“I just can’t get over the fact that they — it seemed like nothing bothered him. How can you do that?” she asked Fox News.
“Everything was so natural and they remained so normal through the whole thing … ’til he went on the run,” she said of the man at the heart of a massive manhunt after fleeing his home days before Petito’s body was found Sunday in Wyoming.
Laundrie had already raised suspicion by turning up at home without Petito in her white van that they had been using to travel across the US.
His parents — Roberta, 55, and Chris, 62 — then refused to let investigators talk to him, later admitting that he had since gone on the run.
Guthrie told Fox News that she is “really upset” at the parents’ apparent stonewalling now that it is clear that Petitio was not only missing but dead.
She said Laundrie’s parents “should have absolutely come forward.”
“I just … can’t believe they didn’t do something. I’m really angry now that they … let this go,” she told Fox.
“I have children, and I know that you do what you can to protect your child,” Guthrie said.
But “that can go so far, and you gotta do the right thing eventually. You have to,” Guthrie said.
