AURORA, Ill. (AP) — Eight years after an Illinois boy disappeared, his family began to think that their nightmare might be over at last.

A young man found wandering the streets of a Kentucky town claimed he had just escaped from two men in the Cincinnati area who held him captive for seven years. And he told police his name was Timmothy Pitzen. It didn’t seem possible that someone so far away could make up such a story. So for a day and a half, relatives waited and hoped for a breakthrough.

Then on Thursday came devastating word from the FBI: DNA tests showed that the person was not Timmothy, a boy from Aurora who vanished at age 6 in 2011, around the time of his mother’s suicide.

“It’s like reliving that day all over again, and Timmothy’s father is devastated once again, as are we,” said the boy’s aunt Kara Jacobs, her voice choked with emotion.

Authorities said the person claiming to be 14-year-old Timmothy was actually a 23-year-old ex-convict who was recently released from an Ohio prison after serving time for burglary and vandalism.

Neither Jacobs nor the boy’s grandmother Alana Anderson tried to hide their disappointment as they struggled for composure during a brief news conference outside Anderson’s home in Antioch, about 60 miles north of Aurora.

Anderson said her prayer has always been that when Timmothy was old enough, “he would find us if we couldn’t find him.” She held out hope that if he’s “in a place where he has communication with the media or a computer, that he’ll remember us enough to look for us, and I think he will. He’s a very smart guy.”

The rest of Aurora seemed to share in the family’s disappointment.

“I know the community won’t give up that he is out there,” said Nick Baughman, former principal at the school where Amy Fry-Pitzen took her 6-year-old son out of his kindergarten class on May 11, 2011, saying something about a family emergency.

Wearing his backpack, Timmothy waved to his classmates, saying “See you tomorrow,” teacher Cheryl Broach recalled.

The two climbed into Fry-Pitzen’s SUV and went on an adventure that included a visit to the Brookfield Zoo outside Chicago, a suburban Chicago resort and another resort in the Wisconsin Dells, a region that calls itself the “Waterpark Capital of the World.”

The next day, according to video footage released later by police, the boy and his mother were seen leaving the Kalahari Resorts in the Dells. That was the last time the two were seen together. When Fry-Pitzen checked into a motel in Rockford, Illinois, about 120 miles away, on May 13, she was alone, according to police.

The next afternoon, her body turned up but with no sign of her son. A note she left said the boy was being cared for by someone who loved him in a place where he would never be found.

In the first days of the search, police said they found a significant amount of blood in the SUV’s back seat, and tests confirmed it was the boy’s. That news initially terrified Anderson, but the boy’s father explained that his son had a history of nosebleeds and had suffered a serious one just days before he disappeared.

At Greenman Elementary, classmates, teachers and parents tried to help by tying hundreds of yellow ribbons around trees and signs. A garden was planted in Timmothy’s memory.

“There were a lot of prayers, I recall,” Baughman said Thursday. “It was just one of those moments where you want to maintain hope and be supportive.”

Police tried to piece together the route Fry-Pitzen might have taken in her SUV, but in the years that followed, authorities never offered a public explanation for her actions. Reported sightings of the boy went nowhere. Investigators became frustrated by what they called hoaxes.

Family members knew that Fry-Pitzen had been troubled. A woman who was close to the family and whose children played with Timmothy said she noticed something amiss the morning he was taken out of school.

“I got to see him that morning before everything happened,” Linda Ramirez remembered. “She seemed very sad. I was in a hurry and I didn’t stop. I just went to work. I thought I can come over later and talk to her.”

“I would love to see him again and hold him, and say that I’m sorry that I didn’t stop,” Ramirez added. “Believe it or not, his mother loved him very, very much.”

When Fry-Pitzen died, she was on her fourth marriage, Anderson said. Her daughter had battled depression for years and was taking medication.

“She and her husband were having problems,” Anderson said. “We were very concerned and told her we would help her any way we could.”

In 2003, according to an account James Pitzen gave to CNN, his wife “had taken some pills, I guess, and (had been) sitting on the edge of a cliff and supposedly passed out and fell off a cliff.”

James Pitzen, who could not be reached for comment Thursday, ultimately moved back to Iowa, Anderson said. After a while, the flood of calls between him and his wife’s family slowed to a trickle before stopping altogether.

“He went on with his life,” Anderson said. “I think seeing us was upsetting to him.”

If there were troubles at home, they weren’t obvious in the behavior of young Timmothy. He often played with her children and enjoyed their backyard trampoline. He loved to learn and talked about learning Spanish.

“He was a very happy boy with a lot of energy,” Ramirez said. “It was hard to keep up with him.”

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Babwin reported from Chicago. Associated Press writer Corey Williams in Detroit also contributed to this report.

AP – In 2011, 6-year-old Timmothy Pitzen’s mother picked him up at school in Illinois, took him to the zoo and a water park, and then killed herself at a hotel, leaving a note in which she said her son was fine but that no one would ever find him.

On Wednesday, a 14-year-old boy came forward to tell authorities he is Timmothy.

The boy claimed he escaped from two kidnappers in the Cincinnati area and then fled across a bridge into Kentucky.

Authorities from Timmothy’s hometown of Aurora, Illinois, are now checking out the teenager’s story.

“We’ve probably had thousands of tips of him popping up in different areas,” Aurora police Sgt. Bill Rowley said. “We have no idea what we’re driving down there for. It could be Pitzen. It could be a hoax.”

Timmothy Pitzen’s grandmother, Alana Anderson, told WISN-TV Wednesday that authorities have told the family “very little.”

“We just know a 14-year-old boy was found and went to the police,” Anderson said. “We don’t want to get our hopes up and our family’s hopes up until we know something. We just don’t want to get our hopes up. We’ve had false reports and false hopes before.”

Police in the Cincinnati suburb of Sharonville wrote in a short incident report that the boy said Wednesday morning that he had “just escaped from two kidnappers” he described as white men with body builder-type physiques. They were in a Ford SUV with Wisconsin license plates and had been staying at a Red Roof Inn.

Sharonville police said on the department’s Facebook page that the information about the boy’s reported escape was received by police in Campbell County, Kentucky.

“The City of Sharonville Police Department, like every other police agency in the greater Cincinnati area, was requested to check their Red Roof Inn hotels regarding this incident,” the post read. “To the best of our knowledge, we have no information indicating that the missing juvenile was ever in the City of Sharonville.”

The FBI said in a statement Wednesday afternoon that its offices in Cincinnati and in Louisville, Kentucky, were working on a missing child investigation with Aurora police and police departments in Cincinnati and Newport, Kentucky, and the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office in Ohio. The FBI offered no other details.

The body of 43-year-old Amy Fry-Pitzen was found on May 15, 2011. Her wrists were slit. Police believe she killed herself at a hotel in Rockford, Illinois, after taking Timmothy to the zoo and a Wisconsin water park.

A note she left said Timmothy was fine but that no would ever find him. Police investigating her death said she took steps that suggest she might have dropped her son off with a friend.

At the time, police searched for Timmothy in Illinois, Wisconsin and Iowa.

CHICAGO (AP) — Chicago Mayor-elect Lori Lightfoot’s resounding victory was a clear call for change at City Hall and a historic repudiation of the old-style, insider politics that have long defined the nation’s third-largest city.

Lightfoot, a former federal prosecutor who’d never been elected to public office, defeated Cook County Board President and longtime City Council member Toni Preckwinkle on Tuesday with backing from voters across the city. Late results showed Lightfoot, 56, winning every one of the city’s 50 wards.

Lightfoot also made history, becoming the first black woman and the first openly gay person to be elected Chicago mayor. Chicago will become the largest U.S. city to have a black woman serve as mayor when Lightfoot is sworn in May 20. She will join seven other black women currently serving as mayors in major U.S. cities, including Atlanta and New Orleans, and will be the second woman to lead Chicago.

“Out there tonight a lot of little girls and boys are watching. They’re watching us, and they’re seeing the beginning of something, well, a little bit different,” Lightfoot told a jubilant crowd at a downtown hotel. “They’re seeing a city reborn.”

She pledged to make Chicago “a place where your zip code doesn’t determine your destiny,” to address the city’s violence and to “break this city’s endless cycle of corruption” that allows politicians to profit from their office.

Lightfoot emerged as the surprising leader in the first round of voting in February when 14 candidates were on the ballot to succeed Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who decided against running for a third term.

She seized on outrage over a white police officer’s fatal shooting of black teenager Laquan McDonald to launch her reformer campaign. She got in the race even before Emanuel announced he wouldn’t seek re-election amid criticism for initially resisting calls to release video of the shooting.

Joyce Ross, 64, a resident of the city’s predominantly black West Side who is a certified nursing assistant, cast her ballot Tuesday for Lightfoot. Ross said she believes Lightfoot will be better able to clean up the police department and curb the city’s violence.

She was also bothered by Preckwinkle’s association with longtime Alderman Ed Burke, who was indicted earlier this year on charges he tried to shake down a restaurant owner who wanted to build in his ward.

“My momma always said birds of a feather flock together,” Ross said.

Preckwinkle said she called Lightfoot Tuesday night to congratulate her on a “hard-fought campaign.”

“While I may be disappointed I’m not disheartened. For one thing, this is clearly a historic night,” she told a crowd gathered in her South Side neighborhood. “Not long ago two African American women vying for this position would have been unthinkable. And while it may be true that we took two very different paths to get here, tonight is about the path forward.”

That path will have major challenges. Chicago has been losing population, particularly in predominantly African American neighborhoods hit hardest by violence and a lack of jobs.

The new mayor will take over a city that faces massive financial problems. She will have just a few months to prepare a new budget, which in 2020 is expected to have a roughly $250 million deficit. Lightfoot also will take over the worst-funded public pensions of any major U.S. city. Chicago’s annual payments to the retirement systems are slated to grow by $1.2 billion by 2023.

She has expressed support for a casino in Chicago and changing the state’s income tax system to a graduated tax, in which higher earners are taxed at a higher rate — two measures lawmakers have tried for unsuccessfully for years to pass.

Violence and policing will also continue to be an issue, and one that has proven to be politically difficult.

The Chicago Police Department must implement a federally monitored consent decree approved in January. It followed the McDonald killing and a U.S. Justice Department review that found a long history of excessive use of force and racial bias by officers.

While voters also elected several newcomers over City Council veterans, Lightfoot will have to work with a council that has a sizable number of members who are the type of politicians she railed against during her campaign.

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Associated Press reporter Don Babwin contributed.