Finally, after federal agents confronted him with DNA test results proving that he was not the long-missing Timmothy but rather a 23-year-old felon, Brian Rini came clean, according to court documents released Friday as he was charged in Ohio with making a false statement to federal officials.
Rini told the agents that he had recently watched an episode of “20/20” about Timmothy’s case and the Pitzen family’s long search for the boy. Rini said that he had wanted to get away from his own family.
“My heart goes out to the family of Timmothy Pitzen,” Benjamin C. Glassman, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Ohio, said, announcing the charge against Rini, which can carry up to eight years in prison. “I can only imagine the kind of pain that they have been through and that this episode has caused for them.”
A lawyer for Rini did not respond to phone and email messages.
The odd events, which played out over two days amid intense media attention, at first raised the possibility of a happy ending for Timmothy’s extended family, which had waited years for just such a moment. But it soon spiraled into a new layer of misery, as word of a hoax filtered out and the police and relatives in Illinois, where Timmothy had lived, were sent reeling once more. “It’s been awful,” Alana Anderson, Timmothy’s grandmother, said.
On Wednesday, he had emerged, agitated and bruised, along a Newport, Kentucky, street, seeking help from passers-by and saying that he was Timmothy, the missing boy, and that he had escaped from captors and was trying to get home.
Timmothy’s disappearance shook northern Illinois in the spring of 2011. He vanished that May after his mother, Amy Fry-Pitzen, took him out of an elementary school in Aurora and drove him to Wisconsin, where they were last seen together at a water park.
A massive, yearslong search, wide distribution of posters showing Timmothy’s photo, and urgent pleas from his father and other relatives have failed to locate Timmothy.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.