Post by Joanna on Sept 17, 2015 23:10:21 GMT -5
What Happened to Timmothy Pitzen?
AURORA, Ill. – The disappearance of six-year-old Timmothy Pitzen from suburban Aurora has baffled investigators since he went missing in 2011. The years that have passed don’t mean authorities have given up hope of finding him alive and well. Pitzen’s was introduced to a national audience when it was featured on CNN’s The Hunt with the hope that someone watching the show will spot Timmothy and tell authorities.
Aurora police detective Lee Catavu, who was interviewed for the show, is convinced Pitzen is alive and will not give up hope of reuniting him with his family, according to the Aurora Beacon-News. “I’ll be in bed at night and these thoughts swirl in my head,” he told the Beacon-News in May. “When I get a free moment, even on vacation, my mind will drift over to this case.”
In May 2011, Pitzen was an only child living in Aurora with his parents James Pitzen and Amy Joan Marie Fry-Pitzen. His world changed forever on the morning of May 11, when his mother unexpectedly pulled him out of his kindergarten class at Greenman Elementary School, according to the Charley Project. She told the school he needed to leave because of a family emergency, but there was no emergency, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Amy then took Timmothy to Brookfield Zoo and they spent the night at Gurnee’s KeyLime Cove Resort. In the meantime, James tried to pick up Timmothy from school and then reported his son and wife missing when he found they were both gone. He repeatedly called Amy’s cell phone but got no answer.
On the morning of May 13, the woman and boy are seen on security footage waiting to check out of the Kalahari Resort in the Wisconsin Dells. Around 1:30 p.m. on May 13, Amy called several people to say that she and Timmothy were fine. Timmothy could be heard in the background of one of the calls saying he was hungry. No one has heard from Timmothy since the phone call.
The events then took a tragic turn. Amy was seen that evening, without Timmothy, at a couple stores in Illinois before checking into the Rockford Inn in Rockford. In her hotel room, she overdosed on antihistamines and took her own life by slashing her neck and wrists. Amy wrote in her three suicide notes that Timmothy was fine and with unnamed people who loved and cared for him. Hauntingly, she also wrote that Timmothy would never be found.
“I have yet to meet one person who believes that she would ever harm her child,” Catavu said in a clip from The Hunt. “The other option is that she turned him over to someone, who as she wrote in her note, would love and care for him.”
Potential Timmothy sightings and tips continue to roll in from around the country, but all of them have been dead ends so far, according to the Beacon-News. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children released an age-progressed photo of Timmothy (above right) earlier this year. The photo is “one of the most critical weapons we have to bring Timmothy home,” Angeline Hartmann a spokesman for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children told the Beacon-News. “It could take nothing more than the right person looking at this face to pick up the phone and make that call.”
Anyone with information about Timmothy’s disappearance or current whereabouts should call the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children hotline at 800-843-5678 or the Aurora Police Department at 630-256-5500. Callers can be anonymous.
Source: Kate Shepherd, Chicagoist.
