Brian Laundrie was reportedly picked up by another driver while hitchhiking just days after his deceased fiancé Gabby Petito was last heard from.
Norma Jean Jalovec recently came forward claiming that the man she picked up on August 29 is believed to be Laundrie, which she didn’t realize until she saw a viral TikTok of Miranda Baker saying she gave the man a ride that same day.
Jalovec told Fox News that she picked up the 23-year-old near Pacific Creek, where he requested to be dropped off at the Spread Creek camping area — the same campground where Petito’s remains were found weeks later.
She recalled that Laundrie got into her passenger seat between 6:15 and 6:20, which wasn’t long after he got out of Baker’s car at Jackson Lake Dam, according to her TikTok.
“I picked him up…” Jalovec told the outlet. “...Something just said, ‘Hey, ask him where he’s going.”
Jalovec explained that the fugitive asked her if she was going to Jackson Hole, the same location she asked Baker about, and both women reported that he mentioned his fiancé and that he had been hiking near Snake River.
“I can’t explain why I was there,” Jalovec, who is a seasonal resident of Wyoming from Florida, admitted. “It was something I don’t typically do. I don’t pick up, I don't pick up hitchhikers in Florida. I've gotten so much s**t from family and friends for picking up a hitchhiker."
According to Jalovec, Laundrie asked to be dropped off at the campground gates, but when she offered to drop him off closer to his campsite, he tried to “get out of the moving car.”
“Everything’s legitimate. Everything’s corroborated. I already talked to the FBI,” Jalovec said.
The update comes right after news broke that the FBI hadissued a federal arrest warrant for Laundrie, who has been missing since September 17.
According to the FBI’s Denver field office, the warrant is not for homicide but for “activities following the death of Gabrielle Petito.”
Amid the ongoing manhunt for Laundrie, another TikToker claimed that she spotted a man of a similar appearance outside a hotel in Canada.
The woman claimed in the video that the man looked “flustered,” before jumping into a car and driving off with another man. She also said he “didn’t know where he was going and had the wrong hotel.”
“I’m not sure if this looks like him or if I just fell too far down the rabbit hole,” she said.
“You can see the dip in his mustache and the ears are bent down, but my ears bend down when I wear a face mask,” the TikTok user, who has since made her account private, said.
“It looked so much like him — it made me feel really nauseous because I’ve never seen him in person, like many of you haven’t, and this is exactly how I imagined he would look,” she said.
“I did inform the hotel and the employees at the hotel didn’t have any idea about the case, which was concerning,” she also stated.
The woman claimed to have already reported the image to local news outlets and the FBI.
