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Timmothy Pitzen Vanished in 2011. A Teenager in Kentucky Says He’s the Missing Boy.
He Said He Was Timmothy Pitzen, a Missing Boy. Tests Show He Isn’t.
(about 2 hours later)
Almost eight years ago, Amy Fry-Pitzen took her 6-year-old boy out of an elementary school in Aurora, Ill., and drove him to Wisconsin, where they were last seen together at a water park.
A person who this week told police that he was Timmothy Pitzen, an Illinois child who vanished eight years ago, is not actually the long-missing child, the authorities said late Thursday. DNA tests showed that the person who approached passers-by in Kentucky, saying that he had escaped from kidnappers, was not Timmothy after all, the F.B.I. said.
Her body was found soon after in a motel room in Rockford, Ill., following an apparent suicide.
“A local investigation continues into this person’s true identity,” Timothy Beam, an F.B.I. agent, said in an email. Mr. Beam added, “To be clear, law enforcement has not and will not forget Timmothy, and we hope to one day reunite him with his family. Unfortunately, that day will not be today.”
She left a note saying that her son, Timmothy, was now in safe hands with someone who loved him and that “You will never find him.” And no one has.
On Wednesday, a person who said that he was Timmothy and that he was 14 sprinted across a bridge from Cincinnati into Newport, Ky. Bystanders initially thought he might be trying to steal a car. But when they approached, they saw bruises and abrasions on his face. The person asked for help, saying he had been held against his will and traded among people for years, and that he just wanted to go home.
Until — maybe — Wednesday.
Law enforcement authorities in Illinois, where Timmothy had lived, and elsewhere had scrambled to determine whether the person was indeed the missing child, and family members of Timmothy — who have searched for him for years — said their hopes were raised.
That’s when a boy who said his name was Timmothy Pitzen, and that he was 14, sprinted across a bridge from Cincinnati into Newport, Ky.
Almost eight years ago, Timmothy, then 6, disappeared after his mother, Amy Fry-Pitzen, took him out of an elementary school in Aurora, Ill., and drove him to Wisconsin, where they were last seen together at a water park. Her body was found soon after in a motel room in Rockford, Ill., following an apparent suicide.
Bystanders initially thought he might be trying to steal a car. But when they approached, they saw bruises and abrasions on his face. The boy asked for help, saying he had been held against his will and traded among people for years, and that he just wanted to go home.
She left a note saying that her son, Timmothy, was now in safe hands with someone who loved him and that “You will never find him.”
The police have not yet said whether the boy really is Timmothy Pitzen, and federal investigators were scrambling to use DNA tests and other methods to try to determine his identity on Thursday.
Jen West, one of Timmothy’s aunts, said the family was disappointed that the person in Kentucky wasn’t Timmothy, but they have been through this before.
If the boy proves to be Timmothy, advocates for missing children said, the case could illustrate how there often can be hope even for the families of children missing for long periods of time.
“It’s a downer,” Ms. West, of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, said in a telephone interview shortly after the F.B.I. disclosed the DNA results. “But the positive aspect of it is that Tim’s face is now on every news station and every newspaper. It’s a blessing in that respect, that the more coverage he gets, the better. If it couldn’t be him, at least his face gets out there and his name is out there, so more people saw him.”
According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, about 3,000 children who were reported missing for at least a year have been found over the past five years. About six in 10 of those children had been runaways, and almost all of the rest had been abducted by a relative. Only 16 of the 3,000 had been abducted by someone who was not a family member.
“The more we can get his face out there, the better,” she said. “It’s sad we don’t have him back, but this will lead to it.”
“Children who have been missing for a long time, six months or more, do come home, and they come home every day and they come home safely,” said Becky Kovar, a spokeswoman for center, who added that the organization has received 120 tips about Timmothy since he went missing almost eight years ago.
Ms. West said that her brother — Timmothy’s father, James — “has been through this a lot with sightings and things, so he really knew to keep his emotions down and not get his hopes up. He’s been through it a few times.”
The boy who appeared in Kentucky this week told the authorities that he had fled from a Red Roof Inn in Ohio, and, according to a police report, “had just escaped from two kidnappers that have been holding him for seven years.”
He described his captors as two white men in a Ford S.U.V. with Wisconsin plates, both of them built like bodybuilders. One had curly black hair and a tattoo of a spider web on his neck; the other man was short and had a snake tattoo on his arms.
A woman who said she was present when the police arrived to take the boy to a hospital said that he appeared agitated, and it looked like he had been struck in his face.
“All of this was red, and this was red, like he’d been punched,” the woman, Fray Knight, said, pointing to both of her cheeks, near her eyes.
“He just was real antsy,” she said. “He wouldn’t stand still. The police had to get him up to the car because he wouldn’t stand still.”
Another witness told a police dispatcher that the boy had approached and pleaded for help.
“He walked up to my car and he went, ‘Can you help me? I just want to get home. Please help me,’” the 911 caller said. “I asked him what’s going on, and he tells me he’s been kidnapped and he’s been traded through all these people and he just wanted to go home.”
A Newport resident, Sharon Hall, told a local television station that she had initially spotted the boy out of her window, wandering around like he might have been planning to steal a car.
“There was a young man standing by my neighbor’s car,” Ms. Hall said. “The way he was acting, he was fidgety, he was moving around, he was looking in her car.”
A spokesman for the Police Department in Aurora, Sgt. Bill Rowley, also told the station that the police have “probably had thousands of tips of him popping up in different areas” over the years, and they did not yet have any idea of whether the boy’s story was true.
“It could be Pitzen,” he said. “It could be a hoax.”
In 2011, Timmothy’s disappearance drew widespread media attention. Posters were put up in Illinois, Wisconsin and Iowa. Law enforcement authorities searched parks and woods across Northern Illinois with help from bloodhounds and all-terrain vehicles. Family members passed out pictures of the boy — then 4 foot 2 inches, with brown hair and brown eyes — in small towns in Illinois.
For months, the authorities followed clues, cellphone logs, email accounts and forensic evidence inside the vehicle that Timmothy had been in with his mother before he vanished. The boy’s car seat, which initially seemed to have gone missing when he disappeared, turned out to be with relatives all along. The authorities continued looking for a Spider-Man backpack, which Timmothy was believed to have with him on the day of his disappearance.
Over the years, sightings were reported, but none panned out. Someone thought they saw him at a travel plaza in Dixon, Ill., but it turned out to be someone else. Someone else reported seeing a boy at a Denny’s in North Aurora, Ill. Another lead took the authorities to Massachusetts.
As of Thursday morning, the authorities still had not determined the identity of the boy who had been found but said that they believed they were getting closer to an answer.
“We still have no confirmation of the identity of the person located, but hope to have something later this afternoon or early this evening,” the Aurora police said in a statement posted on Facebook.
“Our primary focus here is in assisting the F.B.I. in their investigation, and provide information from our missing person case involving Timmothy Pitzen, should this prove to be him. Unless or until his identity is confirmed, we have no official statement at this time.”
The F.B.I. has confirmed only that it is working with local police and sheriff’s departments on the case, adding, “There will be no further statement made on this matter until we have additional information.”
Some of the children kidnapped for long periods by strangers but later rescued include Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus, who were teenagers when they were abducted by Ariel Castro in Ohio and kept in captivity for a decade before Ms. Berry escaped in 2013 and went to the police.
A more recent case: Jayme Closs, 13, whose kidnapper killed her parents in Wisconsin in October and then held her captive for three months, until she escaped.
