Sandy MaloneCincinnati, OH – DNA test results on Thursday determined that the “boy” who claimed to be the missing Timmothy Pitzen on Wednesday in Kentucky is not the same child.
That “boy” has been identified as 23-year-old Brian Michael Rini.
Rini showed up just across the Kentucky border on April 3 claiming to be the now-14-year-old boy who had been missing for almost eight years, WBBM reported.
Timmothy, then age 6, was taken from his Aurora, Illinois kindergarten class by his mother, Amy Fry-Pitzen, on May 11, 2011, CNN reported.
Investigators later determined that 43-year-old Amy had taken Timmothy to the Brookfield Zoo that afternoon while she had her car worked on, and then they drove to Gurnee, Illinois and spent the night at the KeyLime Cove Resort.
The next night was spent at the Kalahari Resort in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin and May 13, 2011 was the last time the little boy was seen with his mother on the resort’s surveillance footage, WLS reported.
Three days after Amy took Timmothy from school, she was found dead from suicide in a motel room in Rockford, Illinois, according to CNN.
She had ingested a fatal amount of antihistamines and slashed her wrists, according to The Washington Post.
The mother left a suicide note that was found by the maid.
It said, in part, “I’ve taken him somewhere safe. He will be well cared for and he says that he loves you. Please know that there is nothing you could have said or done that would have changed my mind.”
Timmothy, whose father said knew his name and address and how to call 911 for help, hasn’t been seen since.
On April 3, Rini showed up in Newport, Kentucky asking for help on a residential street.
He told the woman who stopped to help him that his name was Timmothy Pitzen and that he had just escaped his kidnappers, The Washington Post reported.
Crekasafra Night told WCPO she saw the skinny boy with bruises on his face pacing nervously up and down her street.
“He walked up to my car and he went, ‘Can you help me?'” Night told dispatchers when she called 911. “‘I just want to get home. Please help me.’ 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.”
She waited with Rini until officers arrived.
“He looked like he had been beat up, punched in the face a couple of times,” a neighbor told WLS. “You could see the fear on him and how nervous he was and how he kept pacing. He just looked odd.”
Rini told police he had escaped from a Red Roof Inn in Ohio and run over the bridge connecting Ohio to Kentucky, The Washington Post reported.
Police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) worked together to determine his true identity.
He was initially taken to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital for treatment and a DNA test.
Rini described his kidnappers as two well-built men – one wore a Mountain Dew t-shirt and had black curly hair with a tattoo of a spider web on his neck and the other was short with a tattoo of a snake on his arm, WCPO reported.
The FBI’s Louisville office said they were working with Newport police, Cincinnati police, the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office, and Aurora, Illinois police in the investigation.
Before Rini’s identity was announced, Timmothy’s grandmother, Alana Anderson, told WLS that she was “cautiously optimistic.”
“We never stopped looking for him,” Anderson said. “We never stopped looking for him, thinking about him and we love him and we’ll do everything we can to get him back to a good life.”
Rini’s motive is not known at this time.