How they honored Etan
Nearly 38 years ago, a 6-year-old boy vanished on the first day he walked alone to the school bus stop in SoHo, leaving his family bereft and his city shaken to the bone. Tuesday, after countless hours of investigative effort and nearly six months in the courtroom over two trials, cops and prosecutors delivered justice to the family of Etan Patz.
We honor the perseverance of Stan and Julie Patz, who have lived in anguish longer than most memories stretch — and salute the indefatigable determination of the many crime fighters who would not yield, even in the darkest nights.
That Etan’s confessed killer, Pedro Hernandez, is now guilty on charges of murder and kidnapping renews faith that justice remains possible in heinous crimes once all but declared unsolvable.
For Etan, deliverance came not by happenstance, not by business as usual, but through the superpowered combined forces of family members who kept the cause of their lost boy alive;
NYPD detectives and FBI agents who blazed trails through a wilderness of evidence;
and Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance, who promised in his 2009 campaign that he would take a fresh look at the Patz evidence and refused to give up, even after a first jury in 2015 deadlocked on a single holdout.
The evidence on which Vance and Assistant DAs Joan Illuzzi, Joel Seidemann and James Vinocur this time secured Hernandez’s conviction was inherently fraught, and the verdict, by the jurors’ own account, less than certain in outcome.
The case hinged on the credibility a videotaped confession from 2012, of Hernandez, a man of, to put it charitably, questionable mental stability.
After long suspecting an imprisoned child molester, the FBI in 2012 named a fresh person of interest in Etan’s 1979 disappearance. Soon after, a relative’s tip that Hernandez had spoken years earlier of killing a child in New York surfaced.
Building a case so many years later with such an unreliable figure at the center required uncommon intelligence, and persistence, and faith.
But as much as any power, it was the love of Etan’s parents that kept the memory of their son, and the pursuit of justice, alive decade after decade, even when the trail seemed tortuously circuitous, even though pressing the case meant reliving its horror.
New York children of Etan’s generation, now parents themselves, feel the boy’s ghost coursing through their synapses. So do parents across the nation, who today hold their own children close, never far from watchful adult eyes and apps.
The criminal conviction of Hernandez will never bring this city or this nation back to the more carefree world before Etan. Nor will it end the nightmares for Etan’s parents.
But a measure of closure allows a lost boy, at long last, to rest at peace.