Forest Boy identified

[summer]

Not for nothing, I know the German police feel "made a fool of" all this time, but if they weren't so weird about releasing pictures of people, this could have been resolved last year. 8-D



gma.yahoo.com/mysterious-forest-boy-identified-german-police-091307335--abc-news-topstories.html

The mysterious young man who emerged in Berlin nearly a year ago claiming he had been living in a German forest with his father for five years has now been identified and his story debunked, according to German police.

The young man, who has since been known only as Ray, has been identified as 20-year-old Robin van Helsum, from the Dutch town of Hengelo. Van Helsum was 19 when he went missing nine months ago, and his stepmother identified him from the photo released earlier this week, German police told ABC News.

"We are 100 percent certain that he is this 20-year-old boy, because his stepmother positively identified him," a police spokeswoman told Die Welt newspaper. "We have made contact with his family and friends. A photo where you could see him with a chain round his neck showing his name provided the proof. We are very glad that he has been found."

Van Helsum's story -- that his mother, Doreen, had been killed in a car accident, and that he had lived in the forest with his father, Ryan, until his death last summer -- is now believed to be a lie. He was the subject of a lengthy investigation by German police and the international police organization Interpol.

Van Helsum, who is now living in social care housing in Berlin, seems not to suffer mental problems, authorities told ABC News. Police have no idea what his motives were with the hoax, and they are questioning him again today.

"This is no joke anymore," Berlin police spokesman Michael Maaß told Die Welt. "He made right fools of us. The costs could come down to him."

"Forest boy," as van Helsum came to be known in the German media, wandered into the German capital nine months ago, carrying only a tent and a backpack. He told police he had been walking for five days to get to Berlin. He called himself Ray and told authorities that both of his parents were dead.

Authorities went to painstaking lengths to identify van Helsum, having checked his DNA with international missing person lists, made public appeals, and sent his fingerprints around the world, all to no avail. It was only this week that he allowed his photo to be released.

"There were things that did not fit with his story -- he was relatively clean and the tent he had with him did not look like it had been used for five years," Thomas Neuendorf of the Berlin police told German news website The Local.

German police said van Helsum insisted that he buried his father before starting his five-day trek that landed him in Berlin. But he didn't know where his father died, police say.

Because he spoke English with an accent, German investigators thought that one or both of his parents could be American or British.

There are no immediate plans for what will next happen to van Helsum.

[charminglife]

Wonder if he'll be charged for an illegal investigation or something. 9 months is a long time/lot of work.

[marie427]

Not surprising.

Why would the German authorities assume his parents were native English speakers or from an English-speaking country if he spoke English with an accent?

[Deleted]

Jun 15, 2012 8:22:56 GMT -5 charminglife said:

Wonder if he'll be charged for an illegal investigation or something. 9 months is a long time/lot of work.

I would agree, except that if hes mentally ill I'm not sure he totally knew what he was doing.

[pixy0stix]

Jun 15, 2012 8:31:03 GMT -5 marie427 said:

Why would the German authorities assume his parents were native English speakers or from an English-speaking country if he spoke English with an accent?

I think this is a typo, the previous article said he spoke without an accent.

[ttt]

My hunch is that he's just a little shit who thought this would be funny.

[pixy0stix]

Jun 15, 2012 9:17:03 GMT -5 ttt said:

My hunch is that he's just a little shit who thought this would be funny.

I'm pretty much always in the "they were little shits" category.

I wonder if he was doing it as an experiment? How much do you want to be that he now tries to shop around his story.

[marie427]

Jun 15, 2012 9:20:32 GMT -5 @crackhabit said:

"Because he spoke English with an accent, German investigators thought that one or both of his parents could be American or British. "

I am ? ?? ?? ?? to this because the previous story said they couldn't place his origins because he spoke English with "no particular accent"

In that case, him being Dutch makes sense. It's in the same branch as English within the larger language family that contains most European languages, so when Dutch people speak English they have less of an accent than, say, an Italian person.

[redheadbaker]

Jun 15, 2012 8:17:15 GMT -5 summer said:

Authorities went to painstaking lengths to identify van Helsum, having checked his DNA with international missing person lists, made public appeals, and sent his fingerprints around the world, all to no avail. It was only this week that he allowed his photo to be released.

The last sentence of this quote makes it sound like van Helsum was the one not allowing his picture to be released, not the German authorities.

[summer]

I don't know. Privacy is a big deal. The only times they release pics or full names is when there is a manhunt. But maybe he refused.

It's insane to me that someone would do something like this.

[twotrue]

Well that's a disappointing ending to the story. I was really hoping one of the tin foil hat theories from the previous thread about this would turn out to be true.