Man gets 25 years in N.Y. slaying of missing child
NEW YORK — Almost four decades after firstgrader Etan Patz set out for school and ended up at the heart of one of America’s most influential missingchild cases, a former store clerk convicted of killing him was sentenced Tuesday to at least 25 years in prison.
Pedro Hernandez’s sentencing was the culmination of a long quest to hold someone criminally accountable in a case that affected police practices, parenting and the nation’s consciousness about missing children.
A judge sentenced Hernandez to 25 years to life in prison, meaning he won’t be eligible for parole until he has served at least 25 years. Hernandez had no visible reaction to the sentence.
Etan’s parents, Stanley and Julie Patz, attended the sentencing and said they would “never forgive” Hernandez for what he did.
“Pedro Hernandez, after all these years we finally know what dark secret you had locked in your heart,” Stanley Patz said in court.
“The god you pray to will never forgive you. You are the monster in your nightmares, and you’ll join your father in hell.”
Hernandez didn’t look at them.
Defense lawyer Harvey Fishbein said Hernandez was reluctant to stand up in court and speak but had two things he wanted to say. He wanted to express deep sympathy to the Patz family, but he also wanted to make sure it was clear he was an innocent man.
Hernandez was a teenager working at a convenience store in Etan’s Manhattan neighborhood when the boy vanished in 1979, on the first day he was allowed to walk alone to his school bus stop.
Hernandez, of Maple Shade, N.J., confessed to choking Etan. But his lawyers have said he’s mentally ill and his confession was false, and they’ve vowed to appeal his conviction.
Etan was among the first missing children pictured on milk cartons. His case contributed to an era of fear among American families, making anxious parents more protective of kids once allowed to roam and play unsupervised in their neighborhoods.
His own parents’ advocacy helped to establish a national missing-child hotline and made it easier for law enforcement agencies to share information about such cases. The May 25 anniversary of his disappearance became National Missing Children’s Day.
From the start, the 6-year-old’s case spurred a huge manhunt and an enduring, far-flung investigation. But no trace of him has ever been found. A civil court declared him dead in 2001.
Hernandez, now 56, didn’t become a suspect until police got a 2012 tip that he had made remarks many years before about having killed a child in New York.
Hernandez confessed to police, saying he’d lured Etan into the store’s basement by promising him a soda, then choked him because “something just took over me.” He said he put Etan, still alive, in a box and left it with curbside trash.
His February conviction came in a retrial. His first trial ended in a deadlocked jury in 2015.