14-year-old tells police in Kentucky he's missing boy from Illinois
Police in suburban Cincinnati are trying to positively identify a 14-year-old boy who says he is Timmothy Pitzen, a boy who vanished from Illinois in 2011.
The teenager told police in Campbell County, Kentucky, that he escaped from a Red Roof Inn in Ohio where he had been staying with two men who kidnapped him seven years ago. The boy "kept running across a bridge" into Kentucky, the incident report states. He described the men as being white with "body-builder like physiques," driving a Ford SUV with Wisconsin plates.
Timmothy Pitzen was only 6 years old when he disappeared from Aurora, Illinois. Police found his mother, Amy Fry-Pitzen, dead in a hotel room, after she took her own life. A few days before she was found, Fry-Pitzen picked her son up from school after his father dropped him off, and they went to a Wisconsin water park and a zoo. In a note, she wrote that her son was fine but would never be found, and police believed she had left him with someone she knew.
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Aurora Police Sgt. Bill Rowley said his department has received "thousands of tips" over the years about Timmothy, and they looked for him in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa; Rowley added that he sent two detectives to Cincinnati to see if this is the real Timmothy Pitzen. Timmothy's grandmother, Alana Anderson, told WISN-TV the family is afraid to "get our hopes up. We've had false reports and false hopes before." A DNA test has been conducted.
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Catherine Garcia is night editor for TheWeek.com. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, The New York Times, The Book of Jezebel, and other publications. A Southern California native, Catherine is a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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