VENICE, Fla. — A new trial date period has been set in the lawsuit filed against Brian Laundrie's parents by Gabby Petito's family.
A Sarasota County Circuit Court judge set aside a two-week period between May 13 and May 24 for the trial.
Petito's family is suing Chris and Roberta Laundrie as well as their lawyer Steve Bertolino for negligence in the murder of their daughter. Brian Laundrie, Gabby Petito's boyfriend, was the only suspect and made a confession to killing her in a letter found in a backpack near his remains. Police said he died from a self-inflicted gunshot.
At the case management hearing in Venice, Judge Danielle Brewer pushed back the trial date for the case which was originally set for August 2023 to May 2024 after deliberating with all the lawyers involved.
Matt Luka, the lawyer for Chris and Roberta Laundrie, and Charles Meltz, the lawyer for co-defendant Steve Bertolino, were physically present in court for the hearing. However, Pat Reilly, the lawyer for Petito's family, and all the clients involved in the case appeared via a video conference.
After the hearing, Luka gave some insight into where the case was so far and what more remains at issue ahead of the trial.
"The significant issue we have in this case is we really have not been able to take a lot of discovery meetings, depositions of the witnesses, even uncovering who the witnesses might be beyond our own clients," Luka said.
All the lawyers agreed that not changing the trial date would be ambitious because they still needed more time for fact-finding to build up their case.
Reilly, who is representing Joseph Petito and Nichole Schmidt, is awaiting a response from the federal government on a Freedom of Information Act request he filed. Reilly is seeking to obtain all the information which was gathered by the FBI and several local law enforcement agencies leading up to and during the criminal investigation of Brian Laundrie.
That information would be entered into the case as part of the evidence and determine some of the direction for the trial.
"Without the FOIA request and kind of knowing all the issues that there might be, without taking the depositions of the fact witnesses and trying to understand why they did or didn't do certain things, it's hard to sort of see what experts may or may not be necessary," Luka said.
Along with a new trial date, the judge set dates for jury selection and hearing or dismissing other motions involved in this case. One such motion is a motion for a protective order over the "burn after reading" letter which Mrs. Laundrie wrote to her son Brian.
Luka and the Laundries want to prevent the letter from being included as evidence because they have said that the letter was written before Brian and Gabby took their trip, and has no relevance to the cause of action.
"There definitely hasn't been a judicial determination as to when the letter was created, but our position is that it was created before. Roberta Laundrie authored the letter and so she knows when she wrote it and she's filed an affidavit to that effect," he said.
In that affidavit, Mrs. Laundrie explained that her quote "burn after reading" found on the envelope of the letter to Brian was in reference to a book "Burn After Writing" which she said Gabby had given to Brian. She added that the letter was already with the FBI, found amongst Brian's belongings, at home or in the car, before his body was found in mid-October 2021.