NEWPORT, Ky. _ After a daylong investigation that captured national attention into whether a boy who turned up in Newport, Ky., could be missing Illinois boy Timmothy Pitzen, the Louisville FBI office said in a tweet DNA results show the boy is not Timmothy.
"A local investigation continues into this person's true identity," a subsequent tweet from the Louisville FBI office read. "To be clear, law enforcement has not and will not forget Timmothy, and we hope to one day reunite him with his family. Unfortunately, that day will not be today."
Aurora, Ill., police spokesman Sgt. Bill Rowley also released a statement that reads, in part: "Although we are disappointed that this turned out to be a hoax, we remain diligent in our search for Timmothy, as our missing person's case remains unsolved."
Neighbors in Timmothy Pitzen's former Aurora neighborhood waited nervously earlier Thursday for word on whether a teen who turned up in the Cincinnati area could be the missing youth.
Imelda Mata lives three houses down from Timmothy's old home and has been keeping his neon orange small bike in pristine condition in hopes he'll return home someday.
Mata said Timmothy's father gave the family the bike before he moved as an item to remember him by. Mata didn't let her son use the bike and instead kept it clean, waiting for Timmothy's return.
"(Timmothy) could take the bike back and hopefully it's a happy memory for him because he used to ride it so fast up and down our street," Mata said.
Timmothy Pitzen was 6 when his father dropped him off at Greenman Elementary School in Aurora on May 11, 2011. He was picked up shortly after by his mother, Amy Fry-Pitzen, who took him on a three-day trip to a zoo and water parks before she was found dead by suicide in a Rockford motel room. Notes she left behind stated her son was safe but would never be found. The case has weighed heavily on the Aurora community since then.
According to a Sharonville, Ohio, police report filed Wednesday, dispatchers in Kentucky said a 14-year-old named Timmothy Pitzen fled across a bridge near Cincinnati over the Ohio River and into Kentucky after escaping two kidnappers who had held him hostage for seven years.
"(Timmothy) is originally from Illinois and was last known to be with his mother, who apparently had killed herself. A note was left stating that (Timmothy) was with someone, but safe," the report said.
Mata said her three children were close to Timmothy growing up. Her son is only a few months younger than Timmothy, and it was typical for the children to all be playing together every day, she said.
Timmothy would come in the evenings to watch movies and he'd always ask Mata to make fresh popcorn on the stovetop, she said. The kids would laugh because Timmothy put jelly on his popcorn, while her kids would use hot sauce, she recalled.
"He was like a son to me," Mata said. "I can feel that he's here. That's why the father and grandmother never stopped looking for him."
The last few hours of waiting have been agony, she said.
A Kentucky woman on Thursday described the teen who was found near Cincinnati as "nervous" and on the verge of collapse before police took him away Wednesday.
Sharon Hall, who lives in Newport, Ky., a town across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, said she first saw the 14-year-old early Wednesday and thought he looked suspicious.
It wasn't until later that she learned who the teen might be, she said.
Hall said she saw the teen leaning against a blue SUV on the corner of her street about 7:30 a.m. Wednesday. He was wearing a hoodie and looked dirty, and she first thought he might be trying to break into cars on the street.
"We literally just thought he was going to collapse," she said.
Two girls, likely on their way to school, spotted him, and one appeared to call police, she said.
The teen wouldn't come near the girls and stayed in the middle of the street. He seemed "standoffish" and "nervous," Hall said.
"It was frightening," she said.
Police arrived and, after 15 or 20 minutes, took him off in a squad car, she said. They pulled back his hood and searched him, but she didn't see them handcuff him, she said.
The boy named as Timmothy in the Ohio police report described his kidnappers as two white men. One had black curly hair, a Mountain Dew shirt, jeans and a spider web tattoo on his neck. The other was short with a snake tattoo on his arms. They were in a Ford SUV with Wisconsin license plates, according to the report.
The kidnappers and the boy had been staying at a Red Roof Inn, though the boy was unsure where, the report said.
An FBI spokesman in Louisville said the agency was working on an investigation with Cincinnati and Newport, Ky., police, the Hamilton County, Ohio, sheriff's office and Aurora police. He declined to elaborate.
Amy Fry-Pitzen's body was found May 14, 2011, in a Rockford motel. She had committed suicide, authorities said, and left a cryptic note saying she had left her 6-year-old son in the care of responsible adults who loved him, but that he would never be found.
Though she had long suffered from depression and had tried to kill herself years earlier, her husband, James Pitzen, said at the time his wife would not hurt their child, a belief echoed by other relatives. Authorities said items missing from Fry-Pitzen's Ford Expedition, including Timmothy's car seat and Spider-Man backpack, supported the idea that he might have been given to someone.
As the investigation proceeded, police mapped out a timeline of Fry-Pitzen's travels. After her husband dropped off Timmothy at school on a Wednesday morning, she pulled him out of his kindergarten class an hour later, saying falsely that there had been a family emergency.
She then took him to Brookfield Zoo and a water park in Gurnee. The next day, after stops in Racine and Johnson Creek, Wis., they went to the Kalahari Resort in the Wisconsin Dells. A security camera captured them checking out Friday morning _ the last time Timmothy has been seen.
That afternoon, Fry-Pitzen made several cellphone calls that police say originated near Sterling, Ill., including one in which Timmothy talked to a family member and did not sound as if he were in danger.
Security footage showed that Fry-Pitzen was at a grocery store in Winnebago that night, before she checked into a Rockford motel alone. The next day, about 12:30 p.m., workers found her body.
Police did an intense search of the area where the cellphone calls were made, and months later revealed that dirt taken from Fry-Pitzen's SUV suggested that at some point she had stopped on a gravel road in Lee or Whiteside County.
They recovered her cellphone in October 2013 _ a woman had found it along Route 78 in far western Illinois _ but said it provided no meaningful clues.
Police have received numerous tips over the years from people who believed they had spotted Timmothy, including one that led them to a near-doppelganger in Orlando, Fla. All of them, though, were ultimately dead ends.
