A flier distributed by the NYPD shows Etan Patz, who vanished in New York City on May 25, 1979.(Photo: New York Police Department via AP)
Thirty-five years after a young boy's disappearance from a New York City neighborhood rattled parents nationwide and shattered their illusions of a safe, innocent childhood, a man who confessed to the child's kidnapping and murder went on trial Friday.
Six-year-old Etan Patz disappeared in 1979 on the first day his parents allowed him to walk to school by himself. Etan's disappearance launched a massive search and eventually became the catalyst for a missing children's movement symbolized by Etan's photo on a milk carton.
Prosecutor Joan Illuzzi-Orbon told jurors that multiple confessions make it clear that Pedro Hernandez, 54, who worked at the time at a corner grocery that Etan passed on his way to school, lured the child with a soda to the store's basement, strangled him and disposed of the body.
Hernandez' lawyer Harvey Fishbein discounted the confessions as the rantings of a mentally ill man with a low IQ. Investigators found no DNA, fingerprints or physical evidence that tie Hernandez to the crime, Fishbein said.
"The words of Pedro Hernandez, that is what this case is about," Fishbein said. "He is inconsistent and unreliable yet he is the only witness against himself."
Over three decades, Hernandez, who is charged with murder and kidnapping charges, confessed to multiple people, including his church group and his fiance that he had killed someone, Illuzzi-Orbon said. Hernandez's brother-in-law led police to Hernandez in 2012, she said. Hernandez gave a videotaped confession to police, she said.
On May 25, 1979, the day Etan left his home for his "first big boy walk to the bus stop alone," New York City neighborhoods felt like small towns where "you knew your neighbors and they knew all your children," Illuzzi-Orbon told the jury. Etan had earned a dollar and was eager to spend it at the corner bodega, she said.
Hernandez told police he lured Etan into a bodega basement with the offer a soda, Illuzzi-Orbon said. Hernandez, she said, immediately began choking the child.
"You'll hear him say once he started he couldn't stop," she said. "He choked harder and harder. His own legs began to shake."
Hernandez then stuffed Etan's lifeless body into a 40-gallon plastic bag, placed that bag into a box and set the box out with garbage on the curb a few streets away from the bodega.
"Etan was strangled dead and disposed of before his mom knew he was missing," Illuzzi-Orbon told the jury. "It's a case about a child lost to the world and that fact should never be lost to you."
The boy's disappearance "changed the face of the city forever" and became "a cautionary tale, a defining moment, a loss of innocence, and a city that at that time looked and lived more like a small town than a mighty metropolis."
President Reagan in 1983 proclaimed May 25, the date of Etan's disappearance, National Missing Children's Day.
The details of the crime Hernandez gives in his confession don't make logical sense, Fishbein told the jury. Police coerced the videotaped confession after interrogating Hernandez for nearly seven hours, and manipulated Hernandez who has a below-average IQ, hears voices, has visions and takes anti-psychotic medication, he said.
"He cannot distinguish between what is real and what is not," Fishbein said. "He can't think as well as 98% of this country."
Fishbein also suggested prosecutors had the wrong man and should instead focus on a former boyfriend of Etan's baby sitter who is in prison for sexually assaulting a minor.
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