Pedro Hernandez, the suspect in the disappearance of 6-year-old Ethan Patz, will be making his first court appearance 33 years to the day that the boy went missing. Hernandez, who was 19 at the time, has admitted to strangling the boy after kidnapping him. Read more below.
Thirty-three years to the day after Etan Patz disappeared, spawning nationwide attention to missing children, a suspect will finally appear in a New York courtroom to hear criminal charges in the boy’s abduction and death.
At the hearing, prosecutors are expected to formally file paperwork charging Pedro Hernandez with second-degree murder.
After following up on a tip, police arrested Hernandez, who on Friday was brought to Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan for evaluation. He’s a former Manhattan stock clerk who lived in Etan’s neighborhood at the time the boy vanished.
Hernandez, who was 19 in 1979, told police he lured Etan to a store with the promise of a soda, choked him and placed his body in the trash about a block and a half away, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly told reporters.
“Detectives believe in the credibility of the statement,” Kelly said, although he added that investigators had not uncovered any forensic evidence linking Hernandez to the boy’s disappearance.Kelly said it is unlikely that Etan’s remains would be found.
Author Lisa Cohen, whose 2009 book, “After Etan,” is widely considered the definitive account of the case, said she’s not convinced that Hernandez killed the boy.
“No I’m not, but that’s not necessarily because he didn’t do it,” she said. “That’s just because this has just happened. I’d never heard his name before.”
He has no prior criminal record and is the father of a teenage girl, Kelly said.
Etan, 6, went missing on May 25, 1979, a block from his home in a Manhattan neighborhood. He was walking to school alone for the first time when he vanished.
His disappearance helped spawn a national movement to raise awareness of missing children, including the then-novel approach of splashing an image of the child’s face across thousands of milk cartons.
In the years following Etan’s disappearance, Hernandez told a family member and others that he had “done a bad thing” and killed a child in New York, police said.
While the motive remained unclear, Kelly described it as a crime of opportunity and said Hernandez was remorseful.
“The detectives thought it was a feeling of relief on his part,” he said.
Other employees of the store were interviewed after Etan disappeared, but not Hernandez, police said.
“I can’t tell you why,” Kelly said.
The police investigation continues, as does the FBI’s, the agency said in a statement Thursday night.
“The FBI’s investigation into the disappearance of Etan Patz remains active and ongoing. We remain determined to solve this case,” FBI Assistant Director Janice K. Fedarcyk said in the statement.
The arrest came Thursday, nearly a month after investigators searched the former basement workshop of carpenter Othniel Miller, who had given Etan a dollar the day before the boy’s disappearance for helping him around the shop. Etan had said before he disappeared that he planned to use the dollar to buy a soda.
What DNA could show in Etan Patz case
Lawyer: Miller did not kill Etan PatzThe search produced no apparent clues.
“Mr. Miller is relieved by these developments, as he was not involved in any way with Etan Patz’s disappearance,” said Miller’s attorney Michael C. Farkas. “At the same time, Mr. Miller is very pleased that those responsible for this heinous crime may be brought to justice, and the Patz family may finally have the closure they deserve.”A separate law enforcement source said Thursday that Hernandez’s claims were being treated with “a healthy dose of skepticism.”
The tipster whose information led to Hernandez’s arrest contacted authorities months ago after news coverage of their renewed search. That contact, at least in part, prompted investigators to question Hernandez.
A spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which reopened the case in 2010, declined to comment on the recent development.
Etan was officially declared dead in 2001 as part of a lawsuit filed by his family against Jose Antonio Ramos, a drifter and convicted child molester acquainted with Etan’s baby sitter.
A judge found Ramos responsible for the boy’s death and ordered him to pay the family $2 million, money the Patz family has never received.
Although Ramos was considered a key focus of the investigation for years, he has never been charged in the case. He is serving a 20-year prison sentence in Pennsylvania for molesting another boy and is set to be released this year.
President Ronald Reagan named May 25, the day Etan went missing, as National Missing Children’s Day.
