Family waited nearly 4 decades for justice
Boy was among fifirst missing children put on milk carton.
NEW YORK — Nearly four decades after 6-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 inflfluenced 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 fifinally found some measure of justice for our wonderful little boy, Etan,” said his father, Stanley Patz, choking up. “I am truly relieved, and I’ll tell you, it’s about time. It’s about time.”
He r n a n d e z , who o n c e worked in a shop in Etan’s n e i g h b o r h o o d , h a d c o nfessed, but his lawyers said his admissions were the false imaginings of a man whose mind blurred the boundary bet ween re a l i t y a nd i l l usion. 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, one member said.
“We decided he has an illness ... but that didn’t make him delusional,” said Michael Castellon, a construc tion company attorney. “We think that he could tell right from wrong. He could tell fantasy from reality.”
Hernandez, 56, showed no reaction on hearing the verdict. His lawyers said he planned to appeal. Sentencing is scheduled for Feb. 28.
“I n t h e e n d , we d o n’ 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 d i s a pp e a r a n c e h a s b e e n designated National Missing Children’s Day. His parents lent their voices to a campaign to make missing children a national cause, and it fueled laws that established a national hotline and made it easier for law enforcement agencies to share information about vanished youngsters.
Hi s di sappearance also 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.”
The decadeslong investigation took investigators as far as Israel, but Hernandez wasn’t a suspect until renewed news coverage of the case prompted a brother-inlaw 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 that he’d made similar, if not entirely consistent, remarks to a friend and his ex-wife in the early years after Etan vanished.