Thirty-five years after the disappearance of a 6-year-old boy in Manhattan ushered in an era of protectiveness for America's children, trial began Friday for a mentally ill man with a low IQ who confessed to his murder and kidnapping.
Etan Patz (AY'-tahn PAYTS') was a "tiny man with a big heart" whose life was snuffed out by a worker in the corner candy store on the first day he was allowed to walk alone to catch his bus to school, a prosecutor said.
"You will see and hear his chilling confession," Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Joan Illuzzi-Orbon told jurors. "What you will see is someone who very keenly controls the information that he puts out."
The defense of Pedro Hernandez, 54, of Maple Shade, New Jersey, depends on convincing jurors his confession was false.
"He has visions. He hears voices," defense lawyer Harvey Fishbein said. "He cannot distinguish between what is real and what is not."
Etan was last seen alive walking to the bus stop in 1979. His body has never been found, and memories can falter with the passage of time. But the prosecutor told jurors that Hernandez, a teenager at the time of the crime, implicated himself long before police questioned him:
— Hernandez, without naming the boy, had told friends, relatives and his prayer group in the 1980s that he had killed a child.
— Hernandez told one of those religious acquaintances that he had sexually abused a boy before killing him.
— Hernandez's ex-wife, years ago, said she found a cut-out photo of Etan in a little box where the man stored keepsakes.
Hernandez's brother-in-law Jose Lopez tried to alert authorities for years, the prosecutor said, calling "America's Most Wanted," the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and the NYPD's missing-persons squad. No one got back to him until 2012, when he called again after seeing news of a failed effort to dig for clues in a neighborhood basement.
Etan's disappearance prompted changes in how police and parents think of missing children. His face became one of the first to appear on milk cartons. His parents advocated for legislation that created a nationwide law-enforcement framework to address such cases. The day of his disappearance is now National Missing Children's Day.
But as the seven-man, five-woman jury was chosen from a pool of about 700 people, some of the prospects wondered if memories can be reliable after so many years.
The prosecutor seemed to acknowledge this by evoking a scene from "a Stone Age where the internet didn't exist," and where even in New York City, children "played outside until their mothers called them home at dinner time."
"This is the moment we're about to step back into, and into a crime that changed the face of this city forever, a cautionary tale and a defining moment, a loss of innocence," Illuzzi-Orbon said.
Hernandez is "a person who committed a horrible, unthinkable act, and then covered his tracks and lived the rest of his life ... always waiting and wondering when the day would come that his dark secret was out," Illuzzi-Orbon said. "Today is that day."
In videos of the hours-long confessions, Hernandez says he offered Etan a soda to entice him into the basement, and then choked him and dumped him, still alive, into a box with some curbside trash.
"Something just took over me, and I was just choking him," Hernandez told investigators. "He just kind of stood there, and I just felt bad, what I did."
Fishbein said this confession was dreamed up after hours of police questioning, by a man with a history of hallucinations and an IQ in the lowest 2 percent of the population.
He also questioned how Hernandez could carry a box with a 50-pound body up stairs and over a block and a half to the garbage pile.
"It's filled with impossibilities and improbabilities," Fishbein said; No DNA, fingerprint evidence or eyewitnesses connect Hernandez to Etan's disappearance — just his own words.
And while everyone wants the case to be resolved, but "resolution only comes if you demand proof beyond a reasonable doubt, keeping the burden of proof where it is," Fishbein said. "There will be no resolution for anyone if the wrong person is convicted in this case."
Hernandez's lawyers pointed to longtime suspect Jose Ramos, a Pennsylvania prisoner who dated a woman who sometimes cared for Etan. Ramos denied killing Etan, but authorities said he made incriminating statements when questioned in the 1980s, and a civil court found him liable for Etan's death in 2004 after he stopped cooperating.
Right before the jury was to be brought in Friday, a man yelled from the audience: "Pedro, you're guilty! I seen the kid in 2 dreams." Court officers made him leave.
Etan's father, Stan Patz, watched quietly from the courtroom. Ethan's mother, Julie Patz, couldn't bear attending, but is expected to testify. The judge is state Supreme Court Justice Maxwell Wiley, and the trial is expected to last up to three months.
FACT BOX
The 1979 disappearance of Etan Patz helped catalyze a national missing-children's movement. Six-year-old Etan was one of the first vanished children whose case was publicized in what became a high-profile way: on milk cartons. His disappearance also helped usher in an age of parental anxiety. Opening statements were made Friday in the murder and kidnapping trial of Pedro Hernandez, who confessed in 2012 but says his admissions were false.
Here's a brief explanation of Etan's disappearance and the ensuing murder case:
A YOUNG BOY VANISHES, AND A MOVEMENT BEGINS
Etan Patz was walking to his Manhattan school bus stop alone for the first time on May 25, 1979, when he disappeared, igniting an exhaustive search and helping to make missing children a national cause in the United States. The anniversary of his disappearance became National Missing Children's Day. His parents helped press for new laws that established a national hotline and made it easier for law enforcement agencies to share information about missing children. The movement grew after the kidnapping and killing of 6-year-old Adam Walsh in 1981 in Florida. Frightened parents soon stopped letting children walk alone to school and play unsupervised in their neighborhoods.
AN INVESTIGATION SPANS CONTINENTS AND DECADES
Etan's body has never been found, but his family had him legally declared dead in 2001. The investigation stretched across decades and at one point reached Israel. Police got a tip in 2012 and arrested Pedro Hernandez, 54, of Maple Shade, New Jersey. He worked at a convenience store in Etan's neighborhood but had never been a suspect. Hernandez has pleaded not guilty. In his recorded confessions, Hernandez tranquilly recounts offering soda to entice Etan into the convenience store basement and choking him. He says he put the still-living boy into a plastic bag and left it on a street.
A LONG-AWAITED DAY IN COURT
Prosecutors' case centers on Hernandez's confessions, plus statements authorities say he made to people in the 1980s about having harmed a child in New York. The prosecution team hasn't alluded to any physical evidence against Hernandez. Hernandez's defense maintains his confessions are the false imaginings of a man with mental illness and a very low IQ. Prosecutors call the confessions credible. Hernandez has taken anti-psychotic medication for years and has been diagnosed with schizotypal personality disorder, which includes the characteristics of social isolation and odd beliefs.
THE DEFENSE POINTS TO ANOTHER SUSPECT
The defense also wants jurors to consider longtime suspect Jose Ramos, a convicted Pennsylvania child molester. A civil court declared Ramos responsible for Etan's death after he rebuffed questioning, but he was never criminally charged and has denied involvement. Ramos has refused to testify at Hernandez's trial, but some evidence about the investigation into Ramos will be allowed.
Associated Press
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