After 6-year-old Etan Patz passed out on his way to a school bus stop one morning in 1979, his parents, their friends and neighbors frantically scoured the gritty industrial streets and back alleys of Lower Manhattan for miles.
“I remember running around that night and saying, ‘Did you see this little boy?'” recalled artist and chef Susan Meisel, a longtime SoHo resident. “We were looking in dumpsters. It was horror.”
The neighborhood surrounding Prince Street in SoHo was far from what it is today – a fashion center of high-end art galleries, elegant boutiques and trendy restaurants. Back then, its largely empty cast-iron industrial buildings had begun to attract young artists. Rusty wrecks of stolen cars litter narrow cobblestone streets. Boarded storefronts and trash fires were common.
Etan went missing in SoHo on the morning of May 25, 1979. It was the first time the first grader’s mother let him walk alone to a bus stop about a block away. His body was never found. The disappearance riveted the city and the nation. It was the beginning of an era in which little boys and girls were monitored like never before and missing child cases gained national prominence.
“It really hit the neighborhood hard. We were all very close at that point. I was sitting downstairs the day before it happened. I had my arm around him,” said Meisel about Etan. “It was just very sad. And I don’t think anyone will ever get answers.”
That search for answers continues.
On Tuesday, Manhattan prosecutors said they will put a man on trial for a third time after his conviction in the missing children case was overturned in July.
“After a thorough review, the district attorney has determined that the available and admissible evidence supports the prosecution of (the) defendant on the charges of second-degree murder and first-degree kidnapping,” Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Sarah Marquez wrote in a letter to a New York State Supreme Court justice.
A conference in the case against Pedro Hernandez, 64, who was convicted during his second trial in 2017 of Etan’s murder and kidnapping, was scheduled for Monday. He worked in a bodega near Etan’s house when the boy disappeared.
A federal appeals court in July overturned his conviction, ruling that a trial judge was “clearly wrong” in answering a 2017 jury question about Hernandez’s confessions, the Associated Press reported.
“We are very disappointed in the decision … to retry Pedro Hernandez for a third time,” defense attorney Harvey Fishbein said in a statement, adding that his client “is innocent of the charges.”
“But if this 46-year-old case is actually retried, we will be ready,” he said.
Etan’s parents, who moved to Honolulu in 2019, declined to comment to CNN.
“People like to see the family finally get – I don’t think closure – but some sense of resolution,” said Lisa R. Cohen, the author of “After Etan: The Case of the Missing Children that held America Captive” to CNN.
“And I think they thought they got it in 2017 and now it’s back.”
‘Start another era of this case’
A newspaper with a photo of Etan Patz is seen on May 28, 2012, at a makeshift memorial in New York’s SoHo neighborhood, where Patz lived before his disappearance on May 25, 1979. – Mark Lennihan/AP/File
Hernandez was arrested in the case in 2012, more than three decades after Etan disappeared. He confessed to the detectives but his lawyer kept the defendant under pressure to give his account of the crime. His lawyer said that Hernandez is mentally challenged, severely mentally ill and cannot say whether he committed the crime or not.
According to prosecutors, Hernandez told police in a taped statement that he lured Etan into a basement with the promise of a soda as the boy was on his way to school. He said he killed the boy and put his body in a plastic bag.
The former bodega clerk has been repeatedly diagnosed with schizophrenia and has an “IQ in the borderline to mild mental retardation range,” said his attorney Fishbein. Hernandez was questioned by police for more than seven hours and confessed before being read his Miranda rights.
After his first trial in 2015 ended in a hung jury, Hernandez was convicted and sentenced in 2017 to 25 years to life in prison.
“Now I know what the face of evil looks like and he has finally been found guilty,” said Stanley Patz in a news conference at the time. Patz and his wife thought they would never find out what happened to their son, he said.
Over the years the Patz family has worked to keep the case alive and raise awareness about missing children in the United States. The anniversary of Etan’s disappearance, May 25, is commemorated as National Missing Children’s Day.
Etan’s was the first of several high-profile cases that brought concerns about missing children to the forefront of the national consciousness. Photos of Etan and other missing children later appeared on milk cartons.
In another case, in 1981, 6-year-old Adam Walsh was kidnapped from a Florida shopping mall and killed.
In 1984, Congress passed the Missing Children’s Aid Act, which helped lead to the creation of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Cohen said Etan’s disappearance dramatically changed the way Americans viewed their children.
“Before Etan, there was a different way parents saw child safety issues and raised their children,” she said. “The children played in the street, the children came home when it got dark. There wasn’t this incredible tracking. After Etan, not necessarily the minute it happened, but little by little, this movement arose where the parents then became much more concerned.”
Stanley Patz was a professional photographer and Etan was often the sit-in for lighting in the apartment that also served as a photo studio, Cohen said. Images of Etan’s smiling, cherubic face have been widely circulated during the years-long search for the blond, blue-eyed boy.
“His father immediately ran and got these contact sheets he had of these pictures he had taken of Etan and started making copies,” she said. “The community would immediately put them on posters. I think the pictures are a big part of that… It speaks to the power of his visual image.”
According to federal court rulings, AP reported, jury selection for Hernandez’s retrial must begin by June 1, or he must be released from prison.
“There is no such thing as this incredible resolution,” Cohen said. “Certainly not now, because now they will start a whole other ‘era’ of this case.”
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