Yahoo News Teenager wandering the streets claims to be boy who went missing after mother’s suicide in 2011
A 14-year-old boy has claimed to be a boy who vanished eight years ago – shortly after his mother killed herself.
In 2011, six-year-old Timmothy Pitzen’s mother picked him up at school in Illinois, took him to a zoo and a water park, and then killed herself, leaving a note in which she said her son was fine but no one would ever find him.
After years of mystery, a teenager came forward on Wednesday to tell authorities he is Timmothy, now 14, and authorities from his home town of Aurora, Illinois, are checking out the story.
The boy claimed he had escaped from two kidnappers in the Cincinnati area and then fled across a bridge into Kentucky.
#NEW at 11PM: A Newport woman we talked with said the boy, who claims he’s Timmothy Pitzen, who vanished in 2011, was spotted on Columbia Street.
“He walked up to my car, and he went, ‘Can you help me? I just want to get home. Can you just please help me?'” #wlwt @wlwt pic.twitter.com/PJc7BLJRtN
— Dan Griffin WLWT (@DanGriffinWLWT) April 4, 2019
Aurora Police Sergeant Bill Rowley said: “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. It could be Pitzen. It could be a hoax.”
Timmothy’s grandmother Alana Anderson told WISN-TV that authorities have told the family “very little”.
She said: “We just know a 14-year-old boy was found and went to the police. We don’t want to get our hopes up and our family’s hopes up until we know something.
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“We just don’t want to get our hopes up. We’ve had false reports and false hopes before.”
Police in the Cincinnati suburb of Sharonville wrote in a short incident report that the boy said he had “just escaped from two kidnappers” he described as white men with body builder-type physiques.
They were in a Ford SUV with Wisconsin licence plates and had been staying at a Red Roof Inn, he said.
Sharonville police said: ”The City of Sharonville Police Department, like every other police agency in the greater Cincinnati area, was requested to check their Red Roof Inn hotels regarding this incident.
“To the best of our knowledge, we have no information indicating that the missing juvenile was ever in the city of Sharonville.”
The FBI said in a statement that its offices in Cincinnati and in Louisville, Kentucky, were working on a missing child investigation with Aurora police and departments in Cincinnati and Newport, Kentucky, and Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office in Ohio.
The body of 43-year-old Amy Fry-Pitzen was found on May 15 2011 with slashed wrists.
Police investigating her death said she took steps that suggest she might have left her son with a friend.
