After 6-year-old Etan Patz disappeared on his way to a school bus stop one morning in 1979, his parents, friends and neighbors frantically scoured the grimy industrial streets and back alleys of Lower Manhattan for miles.
“I remember running in that night and saying, ‘Did you see this little boy?'” recalled artist and chef Susan Meisel, a longtime SoHo resident. “We were looking in the dumpsters. It was terrible.”
The neighborhood around Prince Street in SoHo was a far cry from what it is today—a trendy hub of high-end art galleries, stylish boutiques, and trendy restaurants. Back then, its mostly vacant cast-iron industrial buildings were beginning to attract young artists. Rusty wrecks of stolen cars littered the narrow, cobbled streets. Blocked storefronts and trash fires were common.
Etan disappeared in SoHo on the morning of May 25, 1979. It was the first time the first-grader’s mother had let him walk alone to a bus stop about a block away. His body was never found. The disappearance riveted the city and the nation. It was the beginning of an era where young boys and girls would be watched like never before, and missing children cases gained national prominence.
“It hit the neighborhood really hard. We were all very close at the time. I was sitting on the collar the day before it happened. I had my arm around him,” Meisel said of Etan. “It was just very sad. And I don’t think anyone will ever get answers.”
The search for answers continues.
Manhattan prosecutors on Tuesday said they will indict a man for a third time after his conviction in the missing child case was overturned in July.
“After a thorough review, the district attorney has determined that the available and 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 a New York State Supreme Court judge.
A conference in the case against Pedro Hernandez, 64, who was convicted during his second trial in 2017 of killing and kidnapping Etan, was scheduled for Monday. He was working at a bodega near Etan’s house when the boy disappeared.
In July, a federal appeals court overturned his conviction, ruling that a judge was “clearly wrong” in an answer to a 2017 jury question about Hernandez’s confessions, the Associated Press reported.
“We are deeply disappointed by 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 retried, we will be ready,” he said.
Etan’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 closure — but a sense of resolution,” Lisa R. Cohen, author of “After Etan: The Missing Child Case that Held America Captive,” told CNN.
“And I think they thought they got that in 2017 and now it’s back.”
“Another era of this case begins”
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 disappearance on May 25, 1979. – Mark Lennihan/AP/File
Hernandez was arrested in the case in 2012, more than three decades after Etan disappeared. He confessed to detectives, but his lawyer kept the defendant under pressure, fabricated his account of the crime. His attorney said Hernandez is mentally deficient, severely mentally ill and cannot say whether or not he committed the murder.
Hernandez told police in a recorded statement that he lured Etan into a basement with the promise of a soda while the boy was walking to school, according to prosecutors. He said he killed the boy and dumped his body in a plastic bag.
The former bodega clerk has been repeatedly diagnosed with schizophrenia and has an “IQ in the range of borderline to mild mental retardation,” 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 in 2015 ended in a hung jury, Hernandez was convicted and sentenced in 2017 to 25 years to life in prison.
“Now I know what the face of evil looks like and he is finally being convicted,” Stanley Patz said at a news conference at the time. Patz and his wife thought they would never find out what happened to their child, he said.
Over the years, the Patz family has 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.
Etan’s was the first of several high-profile cases that pushed concerns about missing children to the forefront of the national consciousness. Photos of Etan and other missing children were later featured on milk cartons.
In another case, in 1981, 6-year-old Adam Walsh was kidnapped from a mall in Florida and killed.
In 1984, Congress passed the Missing Children’s Assistance Act, which helped create the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Cohen said Etan’s disappearance dramatically changed the way Americans looked after their children.
“Before Etan, there was a different way parents looked at child safety issues and raised their children,” she said. “Kids played in the street, kids came home when it got dark. There wasn’t this incredible follow-up. After Etan, not necessarily when it happened, but little by little, this movement was triggered where parents then became much more concerned.”
Stanley Patz was a professional photographer, and Etan was often the lighting arranger in the apartment that also served as a photo studio, Cohen said. Images of Etan’s smiling, cherubic face have been widely circulated during the years-long search for the blond, blue-eyed boy.
“His dad immediately ran out and got these contact sheets that he had with these photos that he had taken of Etan and started making babies,” she said. “The community immediately put them on the posters. I think the imagery is a big part of it… It speaks to the power of his visual image.”
According to federal court orders, the AP reported, jury selection for Hernandez’s retrial must begin by June 1, or he must be released from prison.
“There is no such incredible resolution,” Cohen said. “Certainly not now, because now they’re going to start a whole ‘nother era of this case.’
For more CNN news and newsletters, create an account at CNN.com