Monday, February 2, 2015

Etan Patz's Mother Speaks in Court of the Day Her Son Disappeared - New York Times





She walked slowly but steadily through the courtroom, a lifetime of accomplishments and lasting tragedy behind her, a witness stand before her.


In riveting testimony on Monday, Julie Patz began to describe the tragedy that would come to define much of her life and identity: the disappearance of her son, Etan. She began with simple memories, of how he loved to be photographed, of how life was back then in SoHo, in 1979.


She was one of the last people to have seen Etan, then 6, on the day he disappeared, sending him off to school with a tote bag and a dollar that he had earned, for a soda. Some memories had blurred with time; others were painfully clear.


“I watched him walk one block away," she said in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, at the trial of Pedro Hernandez, who has been charged with Etan's murder. “I turned around and went back upstairs and that was the last time I’ve ever seen him.”



The dollar bill, she remembered precisely, was in Etan's left hand. But as she attempted to recount how she felt when she realized Etan had not made it to school, she paused.





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Timeline: The Case of Etan Patz


“This is not easy," she said, later wiping away tears as she explained how difficult Etan's disappearance has been for his two siblings.


Though Julie Patz was now 72, she would always be known as Etan’s mother, recalled for her loss and for what she made of it. In the years after Etan's disappearance, she and her husband, Stanley, spearheaded a political movement that raised consciousness about missing children, and helped pass laws that created a national legal framework for such cases.


Over the last 15 years, Ms. Patz has withdrawn from the public eye and let her husband take the lead. But on Monday, she re-emerged to resurrect what she could of the day her son vanished, and was presumably killed.


Mr. Hernandez, 54, a factory worker from Maple Shade, N.J., worked in a bodega near the block where Etan vanished. He was arrested in May 2012 after his brother-in-law told the police about stories circulating in the Hernandez family, stories in which Pedro Hernandez had talked about killing a child in New York City in the late 1970s.


In her testimony on Monday, Ms. Patz recalled what she could of that gray morning of May 25, 1979, when she last saw Etan.


“He was insisting he was very grown up and he could take the money he had earned to buy his own drink,” she said. “I capitulated and said O.K., you can walk to the school bus by yourself.”


The tote bag, she recalled, was made of navy blue cloth, decorated with white circus elephants. It was filled with Matchbox cars, a lunch and a cardboard tube packed with pencils, she said. He was wearing a cap from Eastern Airlines.


“I told him to go straight to the bodega and get his drink, so he wouldn’t miss his bus,” she recalled.


Mr. Hernandez eventually gave the authorities two videotaped confessions. In both, he said he had lured Etan into the basement of the bodega with the promise of a soda, and strangled him there.


Now he denies the charges. His lawyers say his confessions are false, the inventions of a weak mind after hours of police interrogation. They say Mr. Hernandez not only has an I.Q. of 70, but also has a personality disorder making it hard for him to distinguish fantasy from reality. He also has hallucinations.


Ms. Patz has not spoken publicly about her son’s disappearance in recent years. In the early 1980s, she responded to the tragedy with vigor, becoming a driving force behind the missing-child movement. She testified before Congress in 1981 in support of a bill to establish a national center to help find children who had disappeared.


Ms. Patz and her husband, Stanley, successfully pushed, along with the parents of an abducted Florida boy, Adam Walsh, and others, for missing-child reports to be entered into the F.B.I.’s national crime database. Etan’s face was the first missing child depicted on a milk carton, and the date of his disappearance, May 25, became National Missing Children’s Day.


The Patzes still live in the same loft, at 113 Prince Street, as they did when Etan went missing. Mr. Patz is a photographer; Ms. Patz ran a small day-care center in their loft. In the months after their boy disappeared, their apartment became a makeshift police command post and media center.


In recent years, she has been less visible. She did not participate in her husband’s effort to have Etan declared legally dead in 2001. She was also less involved in a successful wrongful death lawsuit against a longtime suspect in the case, Jose A. Ramos.


“She was the person who was more out in front on the advocacy work being done and at a certain point became the public face of the trend,” said Lisa R. Cohen, the author of “After Etan,” a book about the case. “Then it became about keeping the case alive, and he did that.”


It was the largely perseverance of Stanley Patz that kept the investigation alive in recent years. In 2010, Mr. Patz pushed the newly elected district attorney in Manhattan, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., to reopen the largely dormant investigation. And the publicity surrounding investigative efforts two years later — the digging up of a basement in SoHo — prompted the tip that led to Mr. Hernandez’s arrest.




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