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 has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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