After 6-year-old Ethan Paz disappeared while walking to the school bus stop one morning in 1979, his parents, their friends and neighbors scoured the grocery industrial streets and back alleys of Lower Manhattan for miles.
“I remember running around that night going, ‘Did you see this little guy?'” recalled longtime Soho resident artist and chef Susan Maisel. “We were looking in the dumpsters. It was a nightmare.”
The neighborhood around Prince Street in SoHo was far from what it is today – a fashionable hub of high-end art galleries, lavish boutiques and trendy restaurants. At the time, its largely empty, cast-iron industrial buildings were beginning to attract young artists. The narrow, cobblestone streets are lined with the rust of stolen cars. Boarded-up storefronts and trash fires were common.
Ethan disappeared in Soho on the morning of May 25, 1979. It was the first time the first-grader’s mother let him walk to the bus stop a block away by himself. His body was never found. The disappearance shocked the city and the nation. It was the beginning of an era in which young boys and girls would be supervised like never before and the case of missing children gained national importance.
“It really hurt the neighborhood. We were all very close at the time. I was sitting in the shack the day before it happened. I had my arm around him,” Meisel said of Ethan. “It was just so sad. And I don’t think anyone will ever get an answer.”
The search for answers continues.
On Tuesday, Manhattan prosecutors said they would seek a third trial after a July conviction in the missing child case.
“After a thorough review, the District Attorney has determined that the available, admissible evidence supports the prosecution of the defendant on charges of second-degree murder and first-degree kidnapping,” Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Sarah Marquez wrote in a letter to the New York State Supreme Court justice.
A conference was scheduled for Monday in the case against Pedro Hernandez, 64, who was convicted during a second trial in 2017 of Etan’s murder and kidnapping. He worked at a bodega near Ethan’s house when the boy disappeared.
A federal appeals court in July ruled that a trial judge was “clearly erroneous” in answering a 2017 jury question about Hernandez’s confession, The Associated Press reported.
“We are deeply disappointed in the decision … to retry Pedro Hernandez for a third time,” defense attorney Harvey Fishbein said in a statement, adding that his client “is innocent of the charges.”
“But if this 46-year-old case is actually retried, we will be ready,” he said.
Ethan’s parents, who moved to Honolulu in 2019, declined to comment to CNN.
“People would love to see the family finally get — I don’t think — but some sense of resolution,” Lisa R. Cohen, author of “After Etan: The Missing Child Case Held America Captive,” told CNN.
“And I think they thought they got it in 2017 and now it’s back.”
‘Start a whole ‘other era’ of this case.
A newspaper with a photo of Etan Patz is seen on May 28, 2012 at a makeshift memorial in New York’s SoHo neighborhood, where Patz lived before his May 25, 1979 disappearance. — Mark Lenihan/AP/File
Hernandez was arrested in the case in 2012, more than three decades after Ethan disappeared. He admitted to the detectives but his lawyer pressed the defendant to account for the crime. His attorney said Hernandez is mentally disabled, severely mentally ill and unable to say whether or not he committed a crime.
Hernandez told police in a taped statement that he lured Ethan to the basement with the promise of soda while the boy was on his way to school, according to prosecutors. He said that he killed the child and threw the body in a plastic bag.
The former bodega clerk has been repeatedly diagnosed with schizophrenia and has an IQ “in the borderline to mild mental retardation range,” said his attorney, Fishbein. Hernandez was questioned by police for more than seven hours and confessed before being read his Miranda rights.
After his first trial ended in a hung jury in 2015, Hernandez was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2017.
“Now I know what evil looks like and he’s finally been convicted,” Stanley Paz said at a press conference at the time. Onion and his wife thought they would never find out what happened to their child, he said.
Over the years the Patz family worked to keep the case alive and raise awareness of missing children in the United States. The anniversary of Etan’s disappearance, May 25, is commemorated as National Missing Children’s Day.
Atans was the first of many high-profile cases that brought the concern of missing children to the forefront of the national consciousness. Pictures of Etan and other missing children were later painted on milk cartons.
In another incident, in 1981, 6-year-old Adam Walsh was kidnapped and murdered from a shopping mall in Florida.
In 1984, Congress passed the Missing Children Assistance Act, which helped create the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Cohen said Etan’s disappearance dramatically changed the way Americans view their children.
“Prior to Etan, the way parents approached child protection issues and raised their children was different,” she said. “The children played in the street, the children came home when it was dark. There was this incredible tracking. After Etan, it is not necessary that the minute it happened, but gradually, this movement began where the parents became very worried.”
Stanley Paz was a professional photographer and Ethan would often sit-in for lighting in the apartment, which also served as a photo studio, Cohen said. Images of Ethan’s smiling, cherubic face were widely distributed during the years-long search for the blond, blue-eyed boy.
“His dad immediately ran over and got these contact sheets that he had these pictures that he had taken of Ethan and started making copies,” she said. “The community was immediately putting them on posters. I think the images are a big part of it … it speaks to the power of her visual image.”
Under the federal court ruling, the AP reported, jury selection for Hernandez’s retrial must begin June 1, or he must be released from prison.
“There is such an incredible determination,” Cohen said. “Certainly not now, because they are now going to start a whole ‘other era’ of this case.
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