NEW YORK (AP) — The murder case surrounding the 1979 disappearance of 6-year-old Etan Patz is on track for a third trial, after a judge declined Friday to dismiss charges against the onetime New York shop clerk charged with abducting and killing the boy on his way to school.
The man, Pedro Hernandez, 65, has been behind bars since his 2012 arrest. He is due back in court in June for a status update. A trial date has not yet been set.
Etan vanished on a two-block walk to his school bus stop on the first day his mom let him go unaccompanied. He was among the first vanished kids to be pictured on milk cartons, and the May 25 anniversary of his disappearance became National Missing Children’s Day.
New York Judge Michele Rodney turned away his lawyers’ arguments that prosecutors waited too long to charge Hernandez and that he can’t get a fair trial now, after decades of media coverage.
“The court will carefully work, together with the parties, to ensure that jurors are selected who promise to be fair and to consider only the evidence and the law, despite what they have learned about the case from the media,” Rodney wrote.
Hernandez’s lawyers declined to comment afterward. Prosecutors had no immediate comment.
Hernandez was a 19-year-old corner store clerk in Etan’s neighborhood, but the man didn’t become a suspect until investigators got a 2012 tip that he had told various people in his life years ago that he’d killed a child or young man in New York.
Hernandez then told police — after seven hours of questioning and before being told he had a right to remain silent — that he had strangled Etan in the shop basement after enticing him there with the offer of a soda. Hernandez later was read his rights and recapped his statement on video, telling authorities: “Something just took over me.”
Defense lawyers said all of Hernandez’ admissions amounted to the imaginings of a mentally ill and intellectually limited man, haunted and confused by a highly publicized tragedy that had happened near his workplace.
Hernandez’ 2015 trial ended in a jury deadlock, a 2017 retrial yielded a conviction, and then a federal appeals court overturned the verdict. The court said the 2017 trial judge mishandled a jury question about determining the validity of Hernandez’ confessions.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office pledged to retry the case but also asked the U.S. Supreme Court to restore Hernandez’ conviction. The high court isn’t obliged to hear the case and hasn’t yet said whether it will.
