This was definitely a situation where the officers dropped the ball in naming her as the aggressor. They did the right thing in separating them, but they treated Brian with kid gloves. The officers initially put words in his mouth, because they asked him if the marks on his face were from her before he even said that they were. It almost seemed as if they were looking for things they could attribute to her. He even conceded that a mark on his hand was from a wire and not Gabby, but agreed that she had scratched his face, claiming that she had done that with her phone, but what “phone” scratches someone? You couldn’t even see the marks they were referring to in the footage, so they couldn’t have been that serious. And though they checked him for marks, they never examined her, even though the 911 calls from witnesses were made due to concerns regarding her safety -not his. Yet suddenly they concluded that “the stories all matched up” even though the story from witnesses was not that Gabby was the aggressor.
And unfortunately because she was crying and flustered, which isn’t surprising considering that she was merely reacting to a major fight, after getting grabbed, pushed, kicked out of her own van and having her phone taken away from her, it was concluded that she was a “needy woman” who was crazy. One officer even tried to jokingly relate to Brian, confessing that he was married with a nutty wife at home too.
When they were pulled over, Gabby & Brian likely thought it was for speeding and not for domestic violence because he was going over 15 miles over the limit. Their stories might have been very different had they known that to begin with, but the officers initially failed to mention that. Brian also hit the curb, suggesting reckless driving-(for which Gabby was ironically supposedly to blame). Yet they didn’t give him a speeding ticket or even mention that after the fact. And they acted like they were throwing poor Gabby a bone by calling it a mental health crisis instead of an instance of her beating up on her boyfriend and not giving him enough space. It’s horrible that they were so unskilled in their deductions, and IMO they were extremely short sighted. Gabby ended up dead less than 2 weeks later, and though hindsight is 20/20, the officers did not to a good job assessing the situation regardless of her subsequent demise. And not only did this incident contribute to wild speculations that blew her mental instability way out of proportion, it confirmed that misogyny is alive and well in the written incident report, in naming her the perpetrator, though nothing she told them definitively indicated that Brian was ever in any significant danger.
