The young man, who turned up Wednesday agitated and desperate along a Newport, Kentucky, street, said his name was Timmothy Pitzen — an Illinois boy who vanished in 2011 at the age of 6.
The prospect that Timmothy had been found sent law enforcement authorities in several states into a frenzy. DNA tests were ordered.
Late Thursday, the answer came: It wasn’t Timmothy. DNA tests proved it, FBI agents said. By Thursday evening, law enforcement authorities said they had determined the person claiming to be Timmothy was actually Brian Michael Rini, a 23-year-old felon from Medina, Ohio.
His motives were unknown, some officers said, and it was not clear whether he will face charges for saying he was Timmothy.
For Timmothy’s family, the events were crushing.
“It’s been awful,” Alana Anderson, Timmothy’s grandmother, who lives in Illinois, told reporters. “We’ve been on tenterhooks. We’ve been alternatively hopeful and frightened. It’s just been exhausting.”
In May 2011, the disappearance of Timmothy Pitzen stunned the communities around suburban Chicago. Timmothy vanished after his mother, Amy Fry-Pitzen, took him out of an elementary school in Aurora, Illinois, and drove him to Wisconsin, where they were last seen together at a water park.
Fry-Pitzen’s body was found soon after in a motel room in Rockford, Illinois, after an apparent suicide. She left a note saying that her son, Timmothy, was now in safe hands with someone who loved him and that “You will never find him.”
By Thursday afternoon, authorities had completed tests and ruled out the possibility that the person was Timmothy.
Rini was released from prison a month ago after serving 14 months for burglary and vandalism, Ohio prison records showed.
In that case, police said Rini had posed as a prospective homebuyer so that he could gain access to a $400,000 home in a Cleveland suburb and throw a drug-fueled party that he promoted on Facebook.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.