Justice for Etan: ‘It’s about time’
NEW YORK — Nearly four decades after six-year-old Etan Patz vanished on the way to his school bus stop, a former convenience store clerk was convicted Tuesday of murder in a case that influenced American parenting and law enforcement.
The jury verdict against Pedro Hernandez gave Etan’s relatives a resolution they had sought since May 1979, and gave prosecutors a conviction that eluded them when a 2015 jury deadlocked.
“The Patz family has waited a long time, but we’ve finally found some measure of justice for our wonderful little boy, Etan,” said his father, Stanley.
“I am truly relieved, and I’ll tell you, it’s about time. It’s about time.”
Hernandez, who once worked in a shop in Etan’s neighbourhood, had confessed, but lawyers said his admissions were the false imaginings of a man whose mind blurred the boundary between reality and illusion. On the earlier jury, the lone holdout against conviction cited the mental health issue as a major reason for his stance.
This time, the jury concluded Hernandez had a psychiatric disorder but hadn’t imagined killing the boy, said jury member Michael Castellon.
Hernandez, 56, showed no reaction on hearing the verdict, but his lawyers said he planned to appeal. Sentencing is scheduled for Feb. 28.
“In the end, we don’t believe this will resolve the story of what happened to Etan back in 1979,” said lawyer Harvey Fishbein.
Etan became one of the first missing children ever pictured on milk cartons, and the anniversary of his disappearance has been designated National Missing Children’s Day. His parents lent their voices to a campaign to make missing children a national cause, and it fuelled laws that established a national hotline and made it easier for law enforcement agencies to share information about vanished youngsters.
And his disappearance helped tilt parenting to more protectiveness in a nation where many families had felt comfortable letting children play and roam alone. As Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Joan Illuzzi put it when the trial opened last fall, Etan “will forever symbolize the loss of that innocence.”
Still, the Patz family — which focused for years on another suspect before Hernandez’s 2012 arrest — may never know exactly what became of the boy. Hernandez told authorities he’d left Etan’s body alive in a box with some trash, but no trace of him has been found since he vanished in a then-edgy but neighbourly part of lower Manhattan.
The decades-long investigation took investigators as far as Israel, but Hernandez wasn’t a suspect until renewed news coverage of the case prompted a brother-in-law to tell police that Hernandez in 2012 had revealed to a prayer group decades earlier that he’d killed a child in New York. Authorities would later learn he’d made similar, if not entirely consistent, remarks to a friend and his ex-wife in the early years after Etan vanished.
After police came to Hernandez’s home in New Jersey, he confessed, saying he’d offered Etan a soda to get him into the store basement and choked him.
“Something just took over me,” he said in one of his recorded confessions to police and prosecutors. He said he’d wanted to tell someone, “but I didn’t know how to do it. I felt so sorry.”
Prosecutors cast his confession as the chillingly believable words of a man unburdening himself, and they argued it was buttressed by the less specific admissions he’d made earlier.
Ultimately, the jury felt his remarks to the prayer group “were very reliable” and corroborated by multiple people, including by Hernandez himself in later statements, Castellon said.