Man Pretending To Be Missing Timmothy Pitzen Is Back In Jail

Aurora Police Department

The ex-con who pretended to be missing Timmothy Pitzen is back in jail.

Timmothy disappeared in 2011 at the age of six when his mother, Amy Fry-Pitzen, took him out of school for a three-day vacation. They drove to Wisconsin and Timmothy was last seen at a zoo and water park.

His mother was found dead a few days later at a hotel in Rockford, Illinois, seemingly by suicide. She had reportedly checked in alone. However, a note found by her body said the boy was safe but added, ‘you’ll never find him’.

In the years since, there have been rumours regarding the boy’s whereabouts and the case was once again catapulted into the headlines this week, when a ‘boy’ contacted police claiming to be the missing Timmothy.

He called 911 in north Kentucky on the morning of Wednesday (April 3) and said he had just escaped his captors, who had been holding him for eight years.

However, court records now show the ‘boy’ was in fact 23-year-old Brian Michael Rini, an ex-con who is now back in jail, the New York Post reports.

Hamilton County Jail

The ‘teen’ was found walking alone in Newport, Kentucky, around 500 miles from where Pitzen first went missing, as Sky News reports.

Illinois police went to meet the boy, though were cautious, saying:

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.

The man then told officers he had been kept at a Red Roof Inn – a chain of hotels in America – by two ‘white men covered in tattoos on their necks and arms who look like bodybuilders’, as per TMZ.

His stories have now unravelled though, with the New York Post reporting Rini was booked into Hamilton County Jail in Ohio around 11pm on Thursday (April 4) after DNA results proved he wasn’t the missing boy.

Rini is also on a holder for the FBI and expected to be picked up Friday morning, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported.

It’s not yet known why the FBI is taking custody of Rini, or why the ex-convict from Medina, Ohio, would try to pass himself off as the missing child.

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Lucy Connolly

A Broadcast Journalism Masters graduate who went on to achieve an NCTJ level 3 Diploma in Journalism, Lucy has done stints at ITV, BBC Inside Out and Key 103. While working as a journalist for UNILAD, Lucy has reported on breaking news stories while also writing features about mental health, cervical screening awareness, and Little Mix (who she is unapologetically obsessed with).