If, as everything seems to indicate, the new trial against Pedro Hernández does not begin in the New York courts on June 1, the Puerto Rican accused of the kidnapping and murder of Etan Patz must be released. 47 years after the disappearance of the 6-year-old boy when he was walking from his house to the bus stop that was to take him to school in SoHo, the case is far from being solved and this Third trial would be a new twist in what Judge Colleen McMahon described as “a saga almost half a century long.”.
Etan’s disappearance, which occurred in May 1979, forever marked the criminal history of the United States and transformed the way in which that country approaches the search for lost minors and the protection of their rights. Due to the impact that the case had, on May 25, the date of the disappearance, it was declared by the United States Congress as National Missing Children’s Day. Etan’s face was the first to appear printed in the “photo on a milk carton” campaigns to find missing children, started in the early 1980s.
In all these years, Hernández has been the main suspect in the case and has already gone through two other judicial processes. In the first, held in 2012, the jury failed to produce a verdict, and in the second, which ended in 2017, he was found guilty of kidnapping and murder and sentenced to life in prison. Due to a lack of physical evidence, the trial relied entirely on alleged confessions from Hernandez, who has a well-documented history of mental illness and a low IQ.
For those reasons, early last year a federal appeals court ruled that Hernández had been wrongfully convicted and ordered his release or a new trial set to expire on the first day of June. After learning of this ruling, the Manhattan prosecutor’s office confirmed in November 2025 that, after a review of the available evidence, it would continue with the prosecution against Hernández for second-degree murder and first-degree kidnapping, and reiterated that it has admissible elements to support the accusation. However, the days go by and it is realized that the only suspect, who has been in prison since 2012, will be released before the new trial begins.
Friday, May 25, 1979 was an important day for Etan and his family. For the first time, his parents allowed him to walk from their house, at 113 Prince Street in SoHo, then a lower-middle-class New York neighborhood, to the school bus stop at West Broadway and Prince Street, two blocks away. He was wearing a black pilot’s cap with the inscription “Future Flight Captain”, a blue corduroy jacket, blue jeans and sneakers of the same color with fluorescent stripes. The yellow bus arrived on time, but Etan was not there and left without him.
At school, the teacher in charge of Etan’s grade noticed his absence, but did not inform the principal. He thought he was sick. It was only when the boy did not return home after school that his mother Julie called the establishment to ask about him and upon finding out that he had not arrived she immediately called the police. Several hours had passed. Detectives initially considered the Patzes as possible suspects, but quickly ruled them out.
That same night, an intense search began in which almost one hundred agents and a team of sniffer dogs participated. “I remember running that night with a photo of Etan asking, ‘Did you see this little boy?’. It really had a big impact on the neighborhood. We were all very close at the time. A day before he disappeared he had been sitting with me on the steps of my house, like we did many times. We were looking in the trash cans. It was a nightmare. It was just very sad. I don’t think anyone will ever get answers,” he recalled many years later, in an interview with cnnthe artist and chef Susan Meisel, a resident of the Platz.
Etan’s father, Stanley, was a professional photographer and had a collection of photographs of his son. The photos with his face were printed on posters that neighbors posted throughout the neighborhood and were also projected on screens in Times Square.. The search continued for weeks. Neighbors and police scoured the city and put up posters with Etan’s portrait, but no clues were obtained that would allow them to move forward.
In 1983, May 25, the anniversary of Etan Patz’s disappearance, was adopted as National Missing Children’s Day in the United States, a date that was later adopted around the world. But the investigation into what had happened to Etan remained stalled.
Only in 1985 was there a glimmer of hope to solve the case. Assistant United States Attorney Stuart R. Grabois, who received the case that year, named as the prime suspect José Antonio Ramos, a convicted child sex offender who had been friends with a former Etan babysitter. In 1982, several children had accused Ramos of trying to lure them into a drainage pipe in the area where he lived. When the police searched the place, they found photographs of Ramos and children who looked like Etan, but everything fell apart because the suspect had an indestructible alibi: when the Platz son disappeared, Ramos was detained at the State Correctional Institution in Dallas, Pennsylvania, serving a sentence for child sexual abuse.
By then, Etan Platz’s face was known throughout the country. Every morning, American families saw it printed on the cartons of milk they picked up at their doors or bought in supermarkets. Despite this national campaign, no clues emerged regarding Etan’s whereabouts. His body was never found and the court declared him legally dead on June 19, 2001, 22 years after his disappearance..
The case was closed until Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. reopened it on May 25, 2010, 31 years after Etan’s disappearance. As part of this new investigation, on April 19, 2012, a joint team of the FBI and the New York Police carried out excavations in the basement of the house at 127-B Prince Street, near the Patz house. The house had been renovated in 1979, shortly after Etan disappeared and an anonymous caller warned that the boy could have been buried there. After four days of work, police reported that they had found “nothing conclusive” at the scene. Another red herring.
Hernandez’s confession
The case seemed stagnant again, but a month later it took a spectacular turn. On May 24, 2012, New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly announced the arrest of a man implicated in Etan’s disappearance. He identified him as Pedro Hernandez, 51, of Maple Shade Township, New Jersey, and said he had confessed to strangling the boy.
In 1979 Hernández was 19 years old and worked in a neighborhood store in the area where Etan and his family lived. Police had never set their sights on him until 2012, when Hernandez’s sister-in-law told investigators that years earlier he had told relatives that he had killed a child in New York. He was immediately detained and subjected to a seven-hour interrogation without being informed of his rights to remain silent and to request a defense lawyer. Pressed by the police, he confessed that he had gotten Etan to accompany him to the store where he worked with the promise of giving him a soda and that once there he took him to the basement and strangled him. According to police records he said: “I’m sorry, I shocked you. I just got carried away with angerHe also reported that he had abandoned the body in a garbage container.
After the confession, the police asked the New York Department of Sanitation for records from May 1979 to try to trace waste collection in the area of the store and find out which dumps were used. With that information, a search was carried out that was unsuccessful.
Without any material evidence to corroborate the confession that Hernández made to the New York police without being read his Miranda rights and despite the reservations of FBI investigators about the statements of the suspect, who had a history of mental illness, the prosecution decided to move forward with the accusation and take him to trial. That caused a short circuit with the FBI, which expressed its doubts to a journalist from The New York Times. With these data, on May 25, 2012, the newspaper published an extensive report revealing that the police did not have a single physical piece of evidence to confirm what Hernández had said during the interrogation.
Despite all those flaws, New York Judge Michele Rodney dismissed arguments by Hernández’s lawyers that prosecutors took too long to charge Hernández and that, after decades of media coverage, he could not get a fair trial. Defenders also maintained that all of Hernández’s confessions were nothing more than the figment of the imagination of a man with mental problems and intellectual limitations, tormented and confused by a highly publicized tragedy that had occurred near his workplace. “The court will work carefully, together with the parties, to ensure that juries are selected who promise to be impartial and who will consider only the evidence and the law, despite what they have learned about the case through the media,” he wrote in his grounds for trial.
Hernández’s first trial, in 2015, ended without a unanimous jury verdict, and in a new trial, held in 2017, the jury found him guilty and sentenced him to life in prison. After a new appeal, in early 2025, the court questioned the way in which the confessions were obtained and presented, establishing that a new trial was necessary to safeguard the procedural guarantees of the accused, who had already been in prison for 13 years. At the moment, Hernández maintains the presumption of innocence under New York law. The last hearing confirmed that all the charges formulated so far constitute formal accusations and not a final sentence, which keeps open one of the most debated criminal files in the recent judicial history of the United States.
Despite all this, 47 years after the disappearance of Etan Patz, it is still unknown what happened to that 6-year-old boy who left his house on the morning of May 25, 1975 to get on a school bus. On the other hand, there is no doubt that his case marked a turning point in the institutional management of cases of missing children by initiating the massive dissemination of images of the wanted children on the packaging of mass-consumption foods.
