For hours, he insisted that he was Timmothy Pitzen, a missing boy who had vanished in 2011 at the age of 6. He told the authorities that he had escaped from a hotel room where two men had been holding him captive for ages. He said that he had been physically and sexually abused.

Finally, after federal agents confronted him with DNA test results proving that he was not the long-missing Timmothy but rather a 23-year-old felon, Brian Rini came clean, according to court documents released on Friday as he was charged in Ohio with making a false statement to federal officials.

Mr. Rini told the agents that he had recently watched an episode of “20/20” about Timmothy’s case and the Pitzen family’s long search for the boy. Mr. Rini said that he had wanted to get away from his own family.

“My heart goes out to the family of Timmothy Pitzen,” Benjamin C. Glassman, the United States attorney for the Southern District of Ohio, said, announcing the charge against Mr. Rini, which can carry up to eight years in prison. “I can only imagine the kind of pain that they have been through and that this episode has caused for them.”

A lawyer for Mr. Rini did not respond to phone and email messages.

The odd events, which played out over two days amid intense media attention, at first raised the possibility of a happy ending for Timmothy’s extended family, which had waited years for just such a moment. But it soon spiraled into a new layer of misery, as word of a hoax filtered out and the police and relatives in Illinois, where Timmothy had lived, were sent reeling once more. “It’s been awful,” Alana Anderson, Timmothy’s grandmother, said.

All along, parts of Mr. Rini’s story were peculiar.

On Wednesday, he emerged, agitated and bruised, along a Newport, Ky., street, seeking help from passers-by and saying that he was Timmothy, the missing boy, and that he had escaped from captors and was trying to get home. The authorities soon took him to an emergency room at a children’s hospital in Cincinnati, court documents say, but he declined to let the authorities take impressions of his fingerprints, raising early suspicions and complicating efforts to quickly identify him.

Mr. Rini’s age might have seemed to be a tipoff: He is 23, far from the 14 years of age that Timmothy would now be. Images of Mr. Rini suggest someone beyond adolescence, with a 5 o’clock shadow.

“One can imagine that if you were actually a child who had been abducted since 2011 and subjected to who knows what — if those allegations were true — who knows what kind of condition that person would be in?” Mr. Glassman said. “So it’s incumbent on law enforcement in doing the investigation, this one or any others, to make sure that if this person does turn out to be the victim, you’re giving them the care that they need.”

By late Thursday, though, the authorities were able to compare Mr. Rini’s DNA to that of Timmothy’s parents, and they were quickly able to rule out the possibility that Mr. Rini was Timmothy. The DNA did match a sample already in the law enforcement system, leading them to identify him as Mr. Rini, from Medina, Ohio. At that point, the court documents said, Mr. Rini admitted who he was.

The Affidavit Against Brian Rini

The man who claimed to be a missing boy was charged with making false statements to a federal agent.

The authorities said Mr. Rini, who was released from prison about a month ago after serving 14 months for burglary and vandalism, had twice before portrayed himself to the authorities as a youth who had been the victim of sex trafficking. Circumstances of those instances were not provided, though officials said they occurred in another part of Ohio.

But Mr. Rini had experience posing as someone he wasn’t, records show. In his recent court case, the police said Mr. Rini had pretended to be a prospective home buyer so that he could gain access to a $400,000 custom-built house in a Cleveland suburb and give a party that he promoted on Facebook. The party left thousands of dollars in damage.

Timmothy’s disappearance shook northern Illinois in the spring of 2011. He vanished that May after his mother, Amy Fry-Pitzen, took him out of an elementary school in Aurora and drove him to Wisconsin, where they were last seen together at a water park.

Ms. Fry-Pitzen’s body was found soon after in a motel room in Rockford, Ill., after an apparent suicide. She left a note saying that her son was now in safe hands with someone who loved him and that “You will never find him.”

A massive, yearslong search, wide distribution of posters showing Timmothy’s photo, and urgent pleas from his father and other relatives have failed to locate Timmothy.

Richard A. Oppel Jr. contributed reporting. Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

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