That twist arrived Monday when a federal appeals court overturned the 2017 conviction of Pedro Hernandez, a troubled former stock clerk at the bodega near Etan’s home in SoHo where he disappeared on the way to school.
The court found fault with the trial court’s instructions to the jury in 2017 and ordered either a new trial or Hernandez’s release, a decision that will fall to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
The arrest of Hernandez in 2012 followed untold hours of police investigation that spanned decades. But then there was a mistrial — hung jury — and, only after a second trial, a conviction. The jury foreperson said the deliberations had been fraught. Now, eight years later, there is the prospect of a third trial in a case that can’t seem to stay closed.
“Jesus Christ,” said Louis K. Meisel, reacting to the decision and probably speaking for many. He owns the art gallery that Etan walked past for the last time on that fateful morning. He has been involved in the investigation since it began. He saw nothing and knew nothing, but the whole terrible thing happened on his turf.
“His mother watched him cross the street, and I owned the rest of the street,” he said. “I don’t know what to say. I’m surprised as hell.”
Forty-six years later, the details of the day remain fresh.
On May 25, 1979, a Friday morning, Etan pleaded with his mother to be allowed to walk nearly two blocks to the school bus alone for the first time. The family lived in an apartment on Prince Street in a neighborhood whose sooty, unpolished grit back then would be unrecognizable in today’s SoHo of high-end boutiques and upscale vibe.
He left home wearing an Eastern Airlines cap and carrying $1 to buy a soda at a bodega on the nearby corner of Prince and West Broadway. He never boarded the bus.
Neighbors and the police combed the neighborhood, taping his picture to poles and calling out his name. He was never seen again, his body never found.
But his image became familiar around the country, staring back from milk cartons. Children who saw that picture would become parents who kept a far shorter leash on their children. The disappearance of Etan Patz led directly to the concepts of stranger danger and helicopter parenting.
Young adults today may not know the name Etan Patz, but his short life story certainly shaped their own childhoods.
“It was a watershed moment, almost a loss-of-innocence moment for the city,” said Daniel R. Alonso, a former chief assistant district attorney in Manhattan.
The year 2012, 33 years later, brought a breakthrough with Hernandez’s arrest. He was an 18-year-old high school dropout who had recently come to New York from Camden, N.Jy.
In videotaped interviews with investigators, Hernandez described approaching a boy on a sidewalk outside a bodega and offering him a soda.
He said he led the boy to the basement, choked him and placed his body in a plastic bag inside a box. He said he left the box with garbage nearby. And he said the boy was the one from the “missing” posters later — Etan.
“I just couldn’t let go,” Hernandez said in one of the interviews. “I felt like something just took over me.”
Jurors in the first trial were unable to reach a verdict. A second trial in 2017 lasted five months, with jurors repeatedly watching the video confession. They also heard testimony from Hernandez’s fellow churchgoers and others who said he had spoken repeatedly about killing a boy.
Hernandez’s lawyers wrote off the confessions as the delusions of a man with a weak grip on reality. But jurors, after nine days of deliberations that began with the group “majorly divided,” according to one juror, returned a verdict: guilty.
Case closed, until Monday, when the appeals court sent it back for a potential third trial. The challenges are many for prosecutors facing the task of trying the case.
“Any case that is old is hard to begin with,” Alonso said. “Any case that is retried is that much harder to do. You have to call all the witnesses back, some of whom aren’t around anymore.”
Etan’s parents, Stanley and Julie Patz, remained in that apartment for many years, neighborhood fixtures beyond the tragedy.
“The Patzes, they told me about it initially when I moved in,” said Jared Bayless, 36, a wealth manager who met the couple when he became their neighbor. “They were always great to me. Stan was almost the super of the building. He would help out if anyone had any issues in their apartment.”
“That was the biggest news story about a child that had been kidnapped and killed to date,” she said. “We did whatever we wanted. It was very common for kids to go out onto the street and play; there was very little supervision.”
As the case seems likely to return to the courts, the attitudes regarding overprotective parenting are still being litigated on and around Prince Street.
