The parents of Gabby Petito, the young woman murdered by her fiancé in 2021, recounted the story of their daughter’s death Wednesday, during the eighth annual Alternatives to Violence Purple Ribbon Breakfast in Loveland, in the hope that others can be spared the same tragedy.
Nichole Schmidt, center, and her husband, James Schmidt, left, talk with people after sharing the story about their daughter, Gabby Petito, during the Purple Ribbon Breakfast at Embassy Suites in Loveland on Wednesday. (Jenny Sparks/Loveland Reporter-Herald)Petito’s mother, Nicole Schmidt, and her stepfather, Jim Schmidt, were the keynote speakers of the fundraising breakfast, occupying most of the 90-minute proceedings and addressing the packed convention center at the Embassy Suites Loveland on Wednesday morning to help the nonprofit raise money for its efforts to support victims with safehouses and other resources.
Addressing a crowd that Alternatives to Violence Board President Allison Seabeck said was nearly twice the size of any previous Purple Ribbon Breakfast and numbered in the hundreds, the Schmidts told the story of their daughter’s death and spoke about the warning signs that they said they missed. Their goal, they said, is that through The Gabby Petito Foundation and its associated awareness campaigns, other parents, friends and family members could avoid the suffering they faced just a handful of years ago.
“They don’t need judgment, they need compassion,” Nicole Schmidt told attendees of victims of domestic violence, intimate partner violence and other forms of abuse. “They need somebody to say ‘I believe you, it’s not your fault, and I’m here.’ Gabby didn’t get that chance, but maybe someone else still can.”
Petito was 22 years old when she and her fiancé began traveling the country in a camper. According to Petito’s mother, she and her husband had initially liked their daughter’s fiancé, and the troubling elements of the relationship only became clear after the horrifying realization they discovered after inquiring about their daughter’s whereabouts in the fall of 2021.
In retrospect, warning signs like Petito’s increasingly fragile emotional state, with additional evidence like text messages between the young woman and her fiancé in the days and months preceding her death, as well as body camera footage from an encounter the pair had with police shortly before she was murdered, clarified that the relationship was far more toxic than they realized.
Since their daughter’s death by strangulation outside Moab, Nicole and Jim Schmidt founded the Gabby Petito Foundation with the aim of educating loved ones on the potential warning signs of an abusive relationship and building the capacity of resources, like Alternatives to Violence, that can offer an escape to those suffering from them.
Since its inception, the foundation has raised over $200,000 to support domestic violence prevention and support, and speak at events across the country, including Alternative to Violence’s Purple Ribbon Breakfast.
Donations to Alternatives to Violence’s work can be made on their website at alternativestoviolence.org.
“We need to start normalizing these conversations,” Jim Schmidt said. “There’s a lot of things in society that we don’t want to talk about, or we pretend it doesn’t happen, or that it’s happening to other people. Whether it’s domestic violence or mental health, we need to normalize these conversations and be open about them. And that starts with everyone in this room.”
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