‘I’m telling you, it was him’

A hiker on the Appalachian Trail told a 911 dispatcher he was “99.99% sure” he spoke with Florida fugitive Brian Laundrie, a recently released recording reveals.

“I’ll meet someone there if they want to,” Dennis Davis, 53, told the dispatcher at the Sheriff’s Office in Haywood County, North Carolina. “I’m telling you, it was him.”

He told the dispatcher that the stranger was “talking wildly” and “acting funny,” the recording shows.

Davis, an engineer from Florida, told The Post this week he was driving where the Appalachian Trail passes near the North Carolina-Tennessee border on Saturday morning when he was reported by a man who was “talking savagely ”.

Laundrie, 23, disappeared in mid-September while wanted for questioning over the death of his girlfriend, Gabby Petito, from Long Island, during the couple’s cross-country trip.

Petito, 22, went missing and was found dead at a Wyoming campsite on September 19, nearly three weeks after Laundrie returned to Florida in her van but without her.

In his 911 call on Saturday, Davis said the man he believed to be Laundrie was driving a white van when he met him on the Appalachian Trail, where Laundrie had camped in the past.

“I think it was a Ford F150,” he told the dispatcher. “I’m not 100% sure, and it was kind of a new model. It wasn’t like an old drummer. It was a newer truck.

“I was turning around on the road and he came up behind me and he slowed down and kind of flashed his lights, like tell me, go ahead and I’ll wait for you,” Davis said. “And as I turned and walked back to his side, he waved his arm out of his truck as if I was slowing down.”

“He was talking wildly,” he told the dispatcher. “He said his girlfriend loved him and he had to go out to California to see her, and he was asking me how to get to California.”

But the man chose to stay off I-40, as Davis suggested, and walked away.

“He was acting in a funny way,” he said. “I wasn’t sure what he looked like. And then I went to park and got the pictures of him back, and I’m 99.99% sure it was him.

The dispatcher told Davis she would report her call to her sergeant – but he told The Post on Saturday that calls to authorities, including the FBI, had not been returned.

However, he told Fox News on Monday he received a reminder from the sheriff’s office on Sunday and was told they sent a deputy to the scene about 12 hours after reporting the sighting.

In a statement on Monday, the Haywood County Sheriff said he had “received a number of calls regarding the Brian Laundrie sighting over the past few days, each under full investigation and areas of concern sought, but all in vain “.