A man who resembles fugitive Brian Laundrie had a close encounter with federal authorities who are looking for the person of interest in the murder of travel blogger Gabby Petito.
Severin Beckwith and his girlfriend Anna Brettmann from New York were hiking the Appalachian Trail in North Carolina when they decided to take a break after a few days of rough weather at a lodge a few miles off the trail.
Beckwith and Brettmann were taking a nap in the lodge when someone knocking on the door woke them up. Before they could respond, the door was busted open.
"Next thing I see is a bunch of guys with riot shields with 'U.S. Marshals' written on them," Beckwith recalled. "Handguns pointed at my face."
He was handcuffed still in his underwear as they helped Brettmann get dressed. Beckwith says he had an idea why they were arresting him. "I really hoped I was right," he said.
It seems authorities have been keeping an eye on travelers on the Appalachian Trail after an engineer from Florida claims he was "99.99 percent sure" he saw Brian Laundrie near the trail a few weeks ago.
At first, some of the features the feds used to try and identify Laundrie also matched Beckwith. Other than looking like him, he says an agent touched the side of his head and remarked that he had a notch in the upper part of his inner ear like Laundrie does.
But Beckwith didn't have tattoos like Laundrie does on his hand and he had his own identification on him. They also ran his fingerprints with a smart device that also proved he was not Laundrie.
Beckwith thinks that when he was at a marina earlier in the day, an employee seemed to think that he was Laundrie by their odd behavior. It turned out that the employee took a photo of Beckwith and sent it to the authorities.
Source: The New Yorker