A Timeline of the Etan Patz Case

New York|A Timeline of the Etan Patz Case

The disappearance of 6-year-old Etan Patz in Manhattan in 1979 horrified New Yorkers, ushered in an era of jittery parenting and took decades to be apparently solved.

On Monday, the conviction that had seemed to end the matter was overturned, reopening the case and reviving one of the most haunting episodes from the city’s troubled 1970s. Here is a timeline of Etan’s disappearance and the decades-long search for his killer.

1979

Etan Patz disappeared on May 25, 1979, as he walked by himself less than two blocks to the school bus through the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan, where he lived with his family. It was the first day his mother had allowed him to walk to the bus alone in the neighborhood, which at the time was a gritty and semi-industrial area. He never made it to the bus.

His parents reported him missing that day when he did not come home from school, and the police searched for him for weeks. His body was never found.

1980s

Etan’s was one of the first missing children’s cases to attract national attention, and it became a cautionary tale during the 1980s. It inspired many parents to restrict their children’s activities and warn them to beware of all strangers.

The boy’s face appeared on billboards and milk cartons along with information about his case. His parents, Stanley and Julie Patz, spoke frequently to the news media. And President Ronald Reagan marked the anniversary of Etan’s disappearance in 1983, proclaiming it National Missing Children’s Day.

2001

Etan Patz was declared legally dead.

2004

Stanley and Julie Patz won a $2 million wrongful death lawsuit against Jose Ramos, a man who had never been charged with Etan’s disappearance, but whom police and prosecutors had considered to be the lead suspect in the case since the 1980s.

No physical evidence has ever emerged that linked Mr. Ramos to the disappearance of Etan, but he was friends with the boy’s babysitter and had told prosecutors he had been with the boy on the day he vanished. A jailhouse informant had claimed that he had bragged about raping and killing the child.

At the time of the lawsuit, Mr. Ramos was incarcerated in Pennsylvania for sexually assaulting an 8-year-old boy. The Patzes never collected the money awarded to them in the suit.

2012

Pedro Hernandez was arrested after he confessed to killing Etan. At the time of the disappearance, Mr. Hernandez was an 18-year-old employee of a bodega at West Broadway and Prince Street, near the Patz home.

He told investigators near his home in New Jersey that he had lured the boy into a basement at the bodega by promising him a soda, then strangled him, put his body into a bag and threw it into a nearby dumpster.

He later recanted and pleaded not guilty to a charge of second-degree murder. His lawyer said he had a history of severe mental illness, a low intelligence and was prone to vivid hallucinations.

Later, Mr. Hernandez’s sister and a leader from their church said Mr. Hernandez had confessed that he had killed a child to a parish prayer group one day in the early 1980s, but no one present ever called the police.

2015

After a four-month trial in State Supreme Court in Manhattan and 18 days of deliberation, jurors failed to reach a verdict, forcing Justice Maxwell Wiley to declare a mistrial. The jurors were deadlocked, 11 to 1, with a the holdout juror telling reporters that he could not vote to convict Mr. Hernandez because of a lack of physical evidence. During the trial, Mr. Hernandez’s lawyers also presented extensive arguments suggesting that Mr. Ramos had killed the child.

2017

Mr. Hernandez was tried for a second time, and a new jury convicted him of kidnapping and murder after nine days of deliberation. After the verdict was announced, the jury foreman told reporters that the deliberations had been “difficult.”

At Mr. Hernandez’s sentencing, Etan’s parents, Stan and Julie Patz, stood and spoke inside a packed Manhattan courtroom. Mr. Patz said, “You took our precious child and threw him in the garbage. I will never forgive you. The God you pray to will never forgive you.”

2025

A federal appeals court on Monday overturned the conviction of Mr. Hernandez, after his lawyers argued that the trial court’s response to a note from the jury was improper and had prejudiced the verdict.

The appeals court agreed, and said Mr. Hernandez must be released from prison unless the state gave him a new trial within a “reasonable period.” The court said the timeline for that must be determined by a federal judge.