The troubled Ohio ex-con who claimed he was the Illinois boy who went missing eight years ago has been hit with a criminal charge for lying to a federal agent, officials announced Friday.
Brian Michael Rini, 23, of Medina, was charged in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, and ordered held without bond, prosecutor Ben Glassman said.
“On behalf of the United States, my heart does go out to the family of Timmothy Pitzen,” Glassman said. “I can only imagine the amount of pain that they have been through and that this episode has caused for them.”
“False reports like this can be painful to the families of missing children and also divert law enforcement resources in order to investigate these untruthful claims,” FBI Cincinnati Acting Special Agent In Charge Herb Stapleton added in a statement. “Law enforcement takes dishonest reports very seriously, and we caution that people making false claims can and will face criminal penalties.”
Rini came forward on Wednesday with the stunning claim that he was Timmothy Pitzen — who vanished in 2011 at age 6 — and that he’d just escaped two men who held him captive for seven years in southwestern Ohio. When cops asked his age, he told them he was 14 and gave them Pitzen’s date of birth, police said.
He had also claimed that he was forced to have sex with men against his well, according to a criminal complaint outlining his charges.
Rini complained of stomach pain, and was taken to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, Glassman said.
There, he declined to be fingerprinted, but did provide a DNA swab for testing, according to Glassman.
He repeatedly lied to federal authorities about who he was — until he was confronted with the DNA results, Glassman said.
Rini admitted he knew so much about the missing boy from watching a segment about him on ABC’s 20/20, the U.S. attorney added. He also told authorities that he wanted to get away from his own family — and that he wished he had a dad like Pitzen’s. If he had really gone missing, Rini claimed, his father would just keep drinking.
Glassman said that authorities did not know for sure Rini was faking his story until they received the DNA match — but “there were suspicions relatively early if for no other reason than he declined to be fingerprinted.”
Rini had twice previously portrayed himself as a juvenile sex trafficking victim — and his tale was only debunked when he was fingerprinted, according to the complaint.
Rini will reappear for a detention hearing on Tuesday, and he could face up to eight years in federal prison, according to Glassman.
Pitzen has been missing since 2011, when his mother, Amy Fry-Pitzen, picked him up from school in Aurora, Ill., and took him to a zoo and a Wisconsin water park.
She was found dead days later with her wrists slit in an apparent suicide in an Illinois hotel room.
Rini has previously been in trouble with police in Medina, and has a record dating back to 2013, according to local station Cleveland 19.
Just last month, he was released from the Belmont Correctional Institution, where he was serving time for burglary and vandalism, the outlet reported.
He has a long history of mental illness — and has “been doing stupid stuff as long as I can remember,” his brother Jonathon Rini told the station.