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Hiker reportedly speaks with 'mentally shot' Brian Laundrie while traveling Appalachian Trail: 'Me and my girlfriend had a fight, and man, I love her'
Image source: Twitter video screenshot

Hiker reportedly speaks with 'mentally shot' Brian Laundrie while traveling Appalachian Trail: 'Me and my girlfriend had a fight, and man, I love her'

A hiker claims to have seen Brian Laundrie driving a white pickup truck in the very early hours of Saturday morning in Tennessee near the North Carolina border.

Laundrie, a person of interest in Gabby Petito's murder, is wanted on bank fraud charges after Petito's remains were discovered in Bridger-Teton National Forest in Wyoming in September.

What are the details?

Dennis Davis, a hiker from Florida, told Fox News over the weekend that he believes he saw Laundrie driving the truck around 12:30 a.m. Saturday morning.

Davis said that he spoke with a person whom he believed to be Laundrie while the two reportedly drove along the same road.

"Davis and some other hikers were going to leave a car at the Northern Terminus of the Appalachian Trail, and [Davis] was going to sleep at the trailhead Friday night," the outlet reported. "He accidentally passed a parking lot near the trail and was going to make a U-turn on Waterville Road when 'a vehicle approached' from behind him and flashed its headlights as if signaling to Davis that he could complete his U-turn."

After completing the U-turn, the outlet reported, Davis pulled up alongside of the white pickup truck.

"I rolled my window down and I started talking with the gentleman," he said. "I could tell right away that something wasn't right with him."

Davis said that he initially suspected the driver of the white pickup truck was on drugs, but after speaking with him, concluded that he was "mentally shot."

The driver of the vehicle then reportedly told Davis that he was headed to California after fighting with his girlfriend.

"He said 'Me and my girlfriend had a fight, and man, I love her, and she called me, and I need to go out to California to see her,'" Davis recalled of the conversation.

Davis said that he advised the driver to take a quicker route on Interstate 40 West, but the driver shrugged off the suggestion and said that he was going to take the far more rural route to travel to California.

Davis said that after the encounter, he pulled into a parking space and immediately began searching the internet for pictures of Laundrie.

"[T]he thing when I was talking to him which really stood out to me was he had a very full but very short, very thick, dark black beard and mustache. And so when I parked my car and I pulled up the picture of him on the internet ... and there was that beard and mustache," he said, which he said immediately prompted him to call local and federal authorities to report the sighting.

Davis recalled, "There is no doubt about it. That was Brian Laundrie was just talking to. 100%. Not a doubt in my mind."

Have authorities responded to this?

A spokesperson for the Haywood County Sheriff's Office in North Carolina told the outlet that dispatch received a call from Davis.

Several deputies responded to the call and came across "three idle vehicles" in the area, but all came up "inconsequential" and were believed to be hikers' vehicles.

The sheriff's office said that it received approximately 10 calls regarding potential Laundrie sightings between Saturday and Sunday.

Fox's report added that as of Sunday morning, neither the FBI nor the police contacted Davis with any sort of response to his cals.

Anything else to know?

Rose Davis, a friend of Petito's, told People in late September that Laundrie was an experienced hiker and previously lived alone in the Appalachians for months at a time.

"He is out in the wilderness, I promise you," Davis told the outlet. "He's out there. He is. If he's alive, he's out there, camping out. ... He lived in the Appalachians by himself for months."

She explained that no one was likely to be harboring the fugitive, as he reportedly has no friends.

Davis added, "This is a very heartbreaking tragedy. It is so surreal. It is so just horrific. There's almost a loss of words for it because no one deserves to go out this way, especially not her."

"You don't know what it's like for someone you considered a friend to murder your best friend," she said. "I've stayed at their house. I've slept in the same house as him. I ate dinners with him, played board games with him, gone to the beach — even though he didn't really hang out with us at the beach — but going to the beach with him. That's scary."

Hiker claims he saw Brian Laundrie on the Appalachian Trailwww.youtube.com

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