Community Corner
North Port To Release Butterflies, Light Candles Saturday Night For Gabby Petito
North Port residents will gather Saturday night in front of City Hall to release butterflies in memory of Gabby Petito.
NORTH PORT, FL — For the past week, North Port has been swarming with news trucks and FBI cars. But for a brief, shining moment on Saturday night, the city will be filled with candles and butterflies.
The community, known best to the world as the home of Brian Laundrie’s family, is planning a candle vigil and butterfly release to honor Laundrie’s dead fiancée, Gabby Petito. On Saturday at 7:15 p.m. in front of North Port City Hall, the community will light candles and release monarch butterflies, which have become associated with Petito due to photos of herself in front of a butterfly mural in Ogden, Utah. They were the last thing Petito ever posted on her Instagram.
“I just want the family to know our community loved Gabby, even if we didn’t all know her,” Lisa Correll, who organized the “Butterfly Wings to Heaven for Gabby” event, told the North Port Sun.
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The event will center around a tree near City Hall that has become an impromptu memorial for Petito, full of candles, photos, cards, and flowers. “It hits your gut,” one visitor from Sarasota told NBC 2 News. “Especially being a parent myself, I cannot imagine what they are going through.”
Similar shrines are springing up all over the country, including in the Wyoming campground where Petito’s remains were found. On Wednesday, Petito’s stepfather James Schmidt and a family friend visited the Spread Creek Dispersed Camping Area in the Bridger-Teton National Forest, where they left a stone cross and flowers, according to The Independent.
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A memorial has also sprung up near The Monarch, a restaurant and art collaborative in Ogden, Utah, where Petito took her famous butterfly photo. Hundreds of visitors have paid their respects, and recreated her photos at the site, an Ogden resident who helped organize a Monday tribute told The Independent.
In Petito’s tight-knit hometown of Blue Point, N.Y., a group of volunteers have placed 1,000 teal ribbons – in memory of Petito’s teal-colored eyes – along three streets, including the one where Petito grew up. On Friday night, residents from all over Long Island are encouraged to “Shine a Light for Gabby” by lighting a candle and place it at their end of their driveway.
A formal candlelight vigil is planned for 7 p.m. Friday at the Blue Point Nature Preserve, and Moloney’s Holbrook Funeral Home will open to the public between 12 and 5 p.m. Sunday.
Petito, 22, disappeared after a summer camping out west with her fiancé Brian Laundrie. She was reported missing Sept. 11, and pronounced dead by homicide on Sept. 21. Authorities – and internet sleuths – continue an aggressive yet so-far unsuccessful search for her fiancé Brian Laundrie, who has been missing since Sept. 14. A grand jury issued a federal arrest warrant for Laundrie Wednesday.
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