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The Disappearance of Etan Patz

Etan Kalil Patz, was born on October 9th, 1972 to Stanley and Julie Patz. His family lived in the SoHo neighbourhood of Lower Manhattan, New York. On the morning of May 25th, 1979, Etan walked two blocks from his home at 113 Prince Street to his bus stop at the crossroad of West Broadway and Prince Street before school. This was the first time he was ever allowed to walk alone. On this day, he was wearing a black “Future Flight Captain” pilot cap, a blue corduroy jacket, blue jeans, and blue sneakers with fluorescent stripes.

At school, his teacher noticed he had not shown up but had not reported the absence to the principal. Julie had called the police when she had noticed that Etan did not return home from school that day. Police suspicion was first turned on the Patzes, thinking they may have something to do with Etan’s disappearance but that was quickly overturned. Police began to search that evening with over 100 officers and a team of bloodhounds. This search continued for weeks and generated no leads, from even the missing children’s posters. Stanley was a photographer and had an array of portraits of Etan that were published on missing children’s posters and even shown in Times Square. Etan’s disappearance even started the missing children's movement. He was also one of the first children to have his photo displayed on a milk carton. Ronald Reagan also declared the anniversary of his disappearance, May 25th, in 1983 to be National Missing Children’s Day. His disappearance also played a role in founding the National Center of Missing and Exploited Children.

In 1985, after the case had been turned over to Assistant US Attorney General, Stuart R. GraBois, Jose Antonio Ramos was pointed as the primary suspect. Ramos was a convicted child predator who had been a friend of Etan’s former babysitter. Before this, in 1982, police were told by multiple boys that Ramos had been trying to lure them into a drainpipe in the area near where he lived. In 1990, GraBois was deputized as a deputy state attorney general in Pennsylvania. This was to help prosecute a case against Ramos for the sexual abuse ofyoung boys and to try to gather more information about Etan's case. When first questioned, Ramos stated that, on May 25th, 1979, he had abducted a young boy and taken him back to his apartment to rape him. Ramos said that he was "90 percent sure" it was Etan, due to the photos he’s seen on the tv. However, Ramos did not use Etan's name and only referred to him as “the boy on tv”. This made Ramos’ confession quite problematic since there was not a definitive link in the case. Ramos also claimed he had "put the boy on a subway" and that he had left him alive.

In 1991, while Ramos was incarcerated, an informant reclaims that Ramos bragged about knowing more about what happened to Etan. Ramos claimed he knew intimate details of Etan’s disappearance and even drew a map of Etan's school bus route, showing that he knew that Etan's bus stop was the third one on the route. This alerted police that Ramos was further involved in the case but with no substantial evidence, he could not be charged. Etan’s body was never found but he was declared legally dead in 2001. Julie and Stanley pursued and won a civil case against Ramos in 2004 where they were awarded $2 Million which they never collected. Ramos was never criminally prosecuted for the murder of Etan as there was no substantial evidence in order to do this. Every year, on Etan's birthday and the anniversary of his disappearance, Stan Patz would send Ramos a copy of his son's missing-child poster with the same message typed on the back, “What did you do to my little boy?". Ramos has adamantly denied that he killed Etan. Hedid serve a 20-year prison sentence in the State Correctional Institution in Dallas, Pennsylvania, for child molestation. He was released from prison on November 7, 2012. Soon after his release he was arrested on a Megan's Law violation.

On May 25th, 2010, Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr, officially reopened the Etan Patz case. On April 19, 2012, FBI and NYPD investigators began excavating the SoHo basement of a nearby neighbor of the Patzes at 127-B Prince Street. This residence had been newly refurbished shortly after Etan's disappearance in 1979. Before, the basement had been the workshop and storage space of a handyman. After a four-day search of the property, investigators announced that there was "nothing conclusive found."

On May 24, 2012, New York Police Commissioner, Raymond Kelly, announced that a man was in custody who had implicated himself in Etan's disappearance. A law enforcement official identified the man as 51-year-old, Pedro Hernandez of Maple Shade, New Jersey. Hernandez allegedly had confessed to strangling the child. He stated in his written confession to police, "I’m sorry, I choke him." According to a 2009 book written about the case, After Etan, Etan had a dollar and had told his parents he planned to buy a soda to drink with his lunch. At the time of Etan's disappearance, Hernandez was an 18-year-old convenience store worker in a neighborhood bodega. Hernandez said that he later threw Etan's remains into the garbage. Hernandez was charged with second-degree murder. According to a New York Times report from May 25, 2012, the police at that time had no physical evidence to corroborate his confession.

In 2012, Hernandez’s brother-in-law, Jose Lopez who hails from New Jersey, reached out to investigators stating he believed that Hernandez was in fact responsible for Etan's disappearance. Statements also collected from Hernandez's sister, Nina Hernandez, and Tomas Rivera, a leader of a Charismatic Christianity group at St. Anthony of Padua, a Roman Catholic church in Camden, New Jersey, indicated that Hernandez may have publicly confessed in the presence of fellow parishioners in the early 1980s to murdering Etan. Nina claimed that Etan’s murder was “an open family secret that Pedro had confessed in church.” A grand jury indicted Hernandez on November 14, 2012, on charges of second-degree murder and first-degree kidnapping. His lawyer has stated that Hernandez was diagnosed with schizotypal personality disorder, which included hallucinations. The lawyer has also stated that his client has a low IQ of around 70, which is "at the border of intellectual disability.”

After a long gruelling process of many years, Hernandez was found guilty of kidnapping and felony murder on February 14th, 2017. Hernandez’s sentencing hearing was scheduled for February 28, with Hernandez facing up to 25 years to life in prison. However, Hernandez's attorneys were granted a temporary delay so as to be able to challenge the verdict, and no new sentencing date was set. Finally on April 18th, 2017, Pedro Hernandez was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for 25 years.

#true crime #true crime blog #crime #truecrime #missingchildren #missing kids #missing children #amber alert #cold cases #etan patz #jose antonio ramos #pedro hernandez

Shaun King reports on a Bronx teenager named Pedro Hernandez who’s story is eerily similar to Kalief Browder.

“Stop and frisk has been banned, but police in the 42nd precinct are actually doing something far worse. They are setting quotas and goals for the number of people each officer must arrest. If you don’t meet or exceed the quotas, you feel the wrath of your supervisors. Instead of rejecting the quotas, some officers are embracing them and rounding up people, particularly teenage children, for crimes they know good and well they didn’t commit — locking them away sometimes for days, weeks, months, or even years at a time — then simply dismissing the charges. This isn’t just a few rogue cops, but an entire precinct is doing this and they are partnering with the Bronx District Attorney’s Office to make it happen. With threats, and even brute force, kids are being coerced to identify and testify against people they don’t even know. Officers are terrorizing families, snatching kids out of their beds, not a few times, but dozens of times per child, sometimes arresting them on false charges, sending them to Rikers, then releasing them months later. Cops think they can do anything they want and it appears they can. Pedro is being framed. They tried to frame him over and over again before this case. And other kids are being framed too. And the kids and families who’ve been victimized by this scandal are hollow shells of their former selves. The Police Commissioner, the Comptroller, and the Mayor all know about this and are doing nothing.”

READ THE STORY HERE : https://medium.com/@ShaunKing/soul-snatchers-how-the-nypds-42nd-precinct-the-bronx-da-s-office-and-the-city-of-new-york-7454a5a43924

#Rikers Island #pedro hernandez #shaun king #nypd #bronx district