For weeks on end now, the speculation surrounding Brian Laundrie’s involvement in the disappearance and death of his fiancé Gabby Petito has been percolating within the pop culture, and it’s not hard to see why: Laundrie returned home from a cross-country trip without Gabby, in her van, and promptly refused to talk to police about her being missing. Then, by the time that Gabby’s body was found, (near where the aforementioned van was seen in a YouTube video), Laundrie had himself disappeared.
Police have long presumed that Laundrie was hiding out in the Carlton Reserve – a massive swath of swampland near his Florida home. The only problem with that is, according to locals, that might not be possible.
Florida cattle rancher Alan McEwen has spent nearly every day of the last 30 years navigating the woods where Brian Laundrie is suspected of hiding and says it’s not conducive to habitation.
“There’s no surviving out here, I don’t know how to say it,” McEwen told Fox News Digital.
“I’ve been in the woods in and out all my life … I have learned a lot in my life, and one thing I know is no one is gonna survive out there for two weeks on foot,” McEwen said.
Since Laundrie reportedly entered the reserve nearly two weeks ago, torrential rainfall has flooded the area with waist-deep water, rendering the lot where Laundrie is said to have left his car unrecognizable.
“Unless he’s got a butt like a duck and can float, he’s not in there,” McEwen said as he gave Fox News Digital a tour of the submerged park in his swamp buggy.
And then, in a statement that seemed to suggest that Laundrie was no longer in Carlton Reserve…
“Anything dead you find in the woods, you’re gonna look up, you’re gonna see buzzards flying like crazy,” he said. “No buzzards, no body is my theory. And I haven’t seen any buzzards flying.”
