Teen Disappears While Visiting Cousins. His Mom Woke Up, She Had a Missed Text from Him: ‘Help’

An 18-year-old North Carolina teen vanished last week during a trip to Florida intended to reconnect with extended family — and his mother says a chilling text message he sent shortly before disappearing continues to haunt her.

Giovanni Pelletier had traveled to Florida in late July with his mother, Bridgette Pelletier, her fiancé Jeremy Brown, and his four siblings. The trip was planned in part to visit a relative undergoing chemotherapy, Bridgette told PEOPLE.

Giovanni had been especially excited. After turning 18 in April, he wanted to connect with his biological father’s side of the family in Florida — where he was born and lived until about age 4 before moving with his mother to North Carolina. His parents were never married.

“I couldn’t give him that cultural background,” says Bridgette, 34, who is of Italian and Puerto Rican descent. “He was craving the culture and the background from his dad’s side of the family… So I wanted him to have those opportunities.”

Before the trip, Giovanni joined a group chat with some of his paternal relatives and arranged for three cousins from that side of the family to pick him up in Englewood, Fla., where he was staying with his mom and siblings.

Bridgette says she had concerns about him going alone but trusted him completely.

Her fiancé, Brown, saw Giovanni off when the cousins arrived at around 1:30 a.m. on Friday, Aug. 1. Bridgette, who had been studying for a pharmacy board exam, was asleep at the time.

Within 30 minutes, Giovanni sent two alarming texts — one of them simply said: “Mom help.”

He called her at 1:56 a.m., then tried FaceTiming her a minute later. When he couldn’t reach her, he texted her sister and his grandfather asking for help.

Bridgette didn’t see the missed messages until around 6:20 a.m. that morning. She also noticed a missed call from one of the cousins who had picked up Giovanni — a call placed nearly an hour after they had left.

“That cousin only called me that one time,” Bridgette says, fighting back tears. “Then no effort was made to communicate with me. No one came back to the house to explain what happened.”

Things took an even more troubling turn when Giovanni’s paternal grandfather — where he was reportedly heading — left Bridgette a voicemail. In it, he claimed there had been some kind of altercation between the boys and that the cousins had left Giovanni on the side of the road in Bradenton, located in Manatee County.

“He said he didn’t have all the details,” Bridgette recalls, “but told me to let him know once I found Giovanni.”

Bridgette tried calling Giovanni repeatedly, then used the GPS tracker on his phone to trace his location.

“When I got there, his phone and backpack were just sitting on the side of the road,” she says. “He wouldn’t have left that. My son eats, sleeps, showers, breathes his phone.”

She eventually connected with some of Giovanni’s paternal family. One of the cousins claimed they had smoked marijuana with Giovanni, after which he allegedly panicked. The cousin said Giovanni cursed at him, leading to a confrontation where Giovanni supposedly pulled out a knife.

According to the cousin, they wrestled the knife away from him — and Giovanni ran off.

Bridgette is skeptical. She describes Giovanni as a young man of strong character and integrity. She suspects he felt threatened and overwhelmed.

The cousin’s version of events also doesn’t align with what the Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office stated in a press release on Saturday, Aug. 2. According to authorities, Giovanni was traveling north on I-75 with his cousins when he “suddenly began to act erratically before exiting the vehicle and walking away near SR70” in Manatee County.

The Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office is working the case with law enforcement in Brevard County, though neither agency responded to PEOPLE’s request for comment.

Bridgette believes the cousins know more than they’ve shared. None of the three, she says, have reached out to her or helped in the search efforts across Charlotte and Brevard counties.

“None of those kids have tried to call to see if I found him, or even asked if he’s okay,” she says. (Attempts to contact the other family members were unsuccessful.)

She’s also grown increasingly frustrated with the response from law enforcement, which she feels has been sluggish — possibly because Giovanni is legally an adult.

“If he were a child, it would be different,” she says.

Giovanni, the oldest of her five children, is known for his compassion and protective nature — especially toward one of his younger brothers who has autism.

A $10,000 reward is being offered for information leading to Giovanni’s location or to an arrest and conviction. A GoFundMe has also been launched to support the ongoing search.

“What scares me most,” Bridgette says, “is that my son knows my phone number by heart. It’s the only one he knows, and he would never disappear like this. Not without trying to reach me.”

“He knows I would burn the world down to find him. I’m not scared of anything or anyone,” she says.

“But right now… I feel so helpless. I have no direction.”