Yesterday the suspect in the 33-year-old case of Etan Patz headed to court for the first time, now Pedro Hernandez is on suicide watch at Bellville Hospital. Hernandez was 19 at the time of Etan’s disappearance and has admitted to kidnapping, strangling, and dumping the 6-year-old’s body. Read more below.
A day after Pedro Hernandez was charged in the killing of 6-year-old Etan Patz, prosecutors now face the task of corroborating his confession and piecing together a mystery that’s confounded investigators for more than three decades.
Neighbors say suspect in Patz killing lived a quiet life with his family
Police say the 51-year-old New Jersey resident confessed to strangling Etan and dumping his body in the trash near a Manhattan bodega where he worked as a teenage stock clerk in 1979.
His attorney, Harvey Fishbein, said no plea has been entered due to a pending psychiatric evaluation. His client is on suicide watch at Bellevue Hospital. Fishbein says his client has a “long psychiatric history” including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and hallucinations.
Former SoHo resident Roberto Monticello, who says he knew Hernandez at the time of Etan’s disappearance, called the former stock clerk a “very strange guy.”
“He was always by himself,” Monticello recalled to CNN affiliate NY1. “(I) never saw him with people.”
His pastor, George Bowen, described Hernandez as a “very quiet, unassuming, almost shy man,” attending church regularly with his wife and daughter, and sitting in the same seat almost every Sunday.“So every Sunday morning I had a conversation with him,” Bowen told CNN Saturday. “But the conversation was more or less a greeting.”
Lisa Cohen, whose 2009 book, “After Etan,” is widely considered the definitive account of the case, said Saturday that she remains skeptical about the man’s confession.
“I had never heard of Pedro Hernandez before this week,” she told CNN.
Etan went missing on May 25, 1979, a block from his home in Manhattan after walking to a school bus alone for the first time.His disappearance helped spawn a national movement to raise awareness of missing children, including the then-novel approach of putting an image of the child’s face on thousands of milk cartons.
While Hernandez’s alleged motive remained unclear, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly described it as a crime of opportunity and said the suspect was remorseful.
“The detectives thought (the confession) was a feeling of relief on his part,” Kelly said.
Other employees of the store were interviewed after Etan disappeared, but not Hernandez, he added.
“I can’t tell you why,” Kelly said.
Hernandez has no criminal record, he noted.
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.
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.
Missing child case ‘awakened America’
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 babysitter.
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.
