CINCINNATI — The FBI and a handful of police departments are working to verify a boy's story that he was abducted years ago, with police in Illinois saying he may be a boy who's been missing since 2011.
The child told police he was being held in a Red Roof Inn somewhere in the area, but couldn't say which one, according to police in the Cincinnati suburbs of Sharonville and Blue Ash.
An FBI spokesperson in Louisville said they're working with Newport, Kentucky police, Cincinnati police, the Hamilton County (Ohio) Sheriff's Office and Aurora, Illinois police on a missing child investigation.
Multiple police agencies said they'd been told to check Red Roof Inns in the Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky area. Workers at several area hotels said authorities had spoken to them and/or requested their guest lists.
Law enforcement sources close to the investigation said they're working on positively identifying the boy. The FBI told WCPO that they're conducting a DNA test to identify the child.
Aurora police told Scripps station WTMJ in Milwaukee that they are sending detectives to Cincinnati to investigate a strong tip about Timmothy Pitzen, a then-6-year-old Aurora boy who went missing in 2011. He would now be 14.
Timothy seemingly disappeared after his mother, 43-year-old Amy Fry-Pitzen, was found dead by apparent suicide in a Rockford, Illinois hotel room.
The FBI has not confirmed a link to the Pitzen case. Aurora police said the DNA tests will take about 24 hours.
ABC News reported at the time that Fry-Pitzen had signed Timmothy out of his kindergarten class and then took him to a zoo and water parks in the Wisconsin Dells before her death. Police in Aurora told ABC News she left a note stating the she left Timmothy with people who "would care for him and love him," but didn't name them.
The boy, his car booster seat and backpack were gone.
The case drew widespread attention and searchers spread across Illinois, Wisconsin and Iowa, but were unable to locate Timmothy. "Crime Watch Daily" covered the case in 2017 and earlier this year the Amazon show "Fireball Run" also drew attention to Timmothy's disappearance.
Timmothy's case is the only one of a missing child out of Aurora, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
