- Because it could be.
A boy named Timmothy Pitzen was kidnapped as a 6-year-old child from Illinois. But then, last week, a man came forward and claimed that he was in fact, Timmothy Pitzen.
But the thing was, he wasn’t Tommothy Pitzen. His name is Brian Rini, and he is from Medina Ohio. He’s also 23 years old and Pitzen would only be in his teens now.
Rini told investigators that he had just escaped from his kidnappers who held him hostage for seven years. A DNA test was immediately ordered to check the validity of this claim, and for good reason. He wasn’t the real Timmothy Pitzen.
The tests “have been returned indicating the person in question is not Timmothy Pitzen,” the FBI’s Louisville field office tweeted.
“A local investigation continues into this person’s true identity. To be clear, law enforcement has not and will not forget Timmothy, and we hope to one day reunite him with his family,” officials continued. “Unfortunately, that day will not be today.”
Riti was located in Newport Kentucky early Wednesday when residents spotted him in a neighborhood looking suspiciously like he may want to steal someones car. When neighbors approached him, he told them he was Pitzen. According to him, after he escaped, he “kept running across a bridge into Kentucky.”
Pitzen had disappeared after his mother picked him up from school in May 2011. It’s believed she took him to the zoo and water park in Wisconsin before killing herself in an Illinois hotel room.
She left a note for the police saying that the boy was fine. The note she left suggested that the boy was left with a friend.
The FBI says its working with several different law enforcement agencies with regards to the missing child investigation.
Aurora Police Sgt. Bill Rowley “disappeared ten years ago and we’ve probably had thousands of tips of him popping up in different areas.” “We have no idea what we’re driving down there for,” he said. “It could be Pitzen. It could be a hoax.”
And in fact, it was.