New York Daily News

How they honored Etan

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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.

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