Florida authorities this week released video they’d found in their investigation of the death of Giovanni Pelletier.
Manatee County Sheriff Rick Wells recapped the teen’s texts and travels in the time before his disappearance.
Pelletier, 18, disappeared on August 1 after getting out of a vehicle driven by a cousin on Interstate 75 near State Road 70 in Manatee County, as CrimeOnline reported. His decomposing body was found a week later in a retention pond not far from where he disappeared.
Pelletier and his family, from North Carolina, were visiting family members in Florida, and the cousin and friends were taking him to visit with still more family members at the time of his disappearance.
Wells said that texts and interviews revealed that Pelletier and the other occupants of the car smoked marijuana and that Pelletier began “tripping,” according to the cousin and friends. They stopped briefly but continued on their journey. As they continued, Pelletier sent text messages to his mother saying, “Help,” then “Help” again followed by “Me.”
The cousin said Pelletier was behaving increasingly erratically, saying he was a “demon” and “I will wreck this car” and “he will kill them all” while trying to open the car door of the moving vehicle.
The driver pulls over on the shoulder of the interstate after Pelletier reportedly spoke about his knife, and Pelletier gets out of the car “and begins running southbound in the southbound lanes of I-75.”
The cousin and friends left Pelletier’s cell phone and backpack on the side of the road and call family members to tell them what happened. They continue on to their initial destination.
Pelletier’s mother reported him missing at about 7:30 a.m.
Deputies respond to the area but see no signs of Pelletier. A trucker picks up Pelletier’s backpack and cell phone, carrying it to Tampa, where it was ultimately recovered after his mother tracked it there.
After days of searching, a friend of the family found the body and called police. An autopsy found no signs of trauma or foul play, but said the cause of death has not yet been determined.
Detectives used Department of Transportation cameras to pinpoint where Pelletier got out of the car on I-75 and then surveillance footage from a nearby Lowe’s that shows a figure believed to be Pelletier running alone toward the retention pond where the body was found.
“There is no one chasing him, no one around him,” Wells said. At the time he was seen running toward the pond, the vehicle he had been travelling in was in was two miles away.
“We know we don’t have anyone that comes down that embankment after him,” he said, noting that the only thing they can’t see on the camera is exactly “what happened once he hit the bottom.”
Investigators are still awaiting final autopsy results and toxicology results. Wells said the cousin and friends who were in the vehicle with Pelletier prior to his disappearance have been cooperating with investigators.
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[Featured image: Manatee County Sheriff’s Office]
