Arches park ranger warned Gabby Petito her relationship seemed ‘toxic’

Melissa Hulls can still hear Gabby Petito’s voice.

On Aug. 12, the visitor and resource protection supervisor at Arches National Park, heard a call come over her radio of a possible domestic assault, stemming from an argument in Moab between Petito and her fiance, Brian Laundrie.

Hulls arrived to find the couple pulled over by a Moab police officer inside the park. Knowing that in a domestic violence situation the female usually feels more comfortable talking with another female, she focused on Petito, who at that point was sitting in the back of a police cruiser.

“I can still hear her voice,” Hulls said in an exclusive interview with the Deseret News. “She wasn’t just a face on the milk carton, she was real to me.”

Hulls pictures the sobbing 22-year-old sitting in the back of the cruiser. She knows her mannerisms, just from the roughly hour-and-a half interaction.

“I was probably more candid with her than I should’ve been,” Hulls recalls, warning Petito that her and Laundrie’s relationship had the markings of a “toxic” one.

“I was imploring with her to reevaluate the relationship, asking her if she was happy in the relationship with him, and basically saying this was an opportunity for her to find another path, to make a change in her life,” she said.

“She had a lot of anxiety about being away from him, I honestly thought if anything was going to change it would be after they got home to Florida.”

In the end, Petito stayed with Laundrie.

“This wasn’t a good day for anybody. We thought we were making the right decision when we left them.”

And on Sunday, when she heard the news that the FBI recovered a body in Wyoming “consistent with the description of Gabby Petito,” the law enforcement ranger of 17 years tilted her head back and let out a sigh of someone all too familiar with a body recovery effort.

“I honestly haven’t looked at my body camera footage for that night. It’s hard to think about now because I feel like I could’ve said more to help her,” she said. “It’s hard not to second-guess myself, and wish I said more, or wish I had found the right words to make her believe that she deserved more.”

‘Where is Gabby?’

It’s a video that millions of Americans watched. Gabby Petito, sitting in the passenger seat of her van crying uncontrollably as she and Laundrie are approached by a Moab police officer.

Petito apologizes multiple times. Laundrie, soft-spoken, nervous and also apologetic, sits in the driver’s seat as he takes the keys out of the ignition and proceeds to explain why the van hit the curb.

“He really stresses me out. This is a rough morning,” Petito tells officers.

“I don’t know, it’s just some days I have really bad OCD and I was just cleaning and straightening up and I was apologizing to him,” she says as the officer walks her away from the van, sitting her down on the curb before helping her into the air-conditioned cruiser.

“I’m sorry that I’m so mean.”

Petito then details a fight between her and Laundrie earlier that afternoon, where she says her fiance tried to lock her out of the car, telling her she “needed to calm…