How to report a missing person
Here’s what to do if someone goes missing.
New York prosecutors announced on November 25 that they will retry a man whose murder and kidnapping convictions in the 1979 disappearance of 6-year-old Etan Patz were overturned earlier this year.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office said in a notice that it determined “the available evidence supports” re-indicting Pedro Hernandez on the same charges. Hernandez, now 64, was sentenced in 2017 to at least 25 years in prison for the kidnapping and murder of Etan in New York City, one of the nation’s most notorious child disappearance cases.
In July, a federal appeals court reversed Hernandez’s conviction, arguing that jury records were improperly handled during the trial, “prejudicing the verdict.” In October, another judge gave the district attorney until Dec. 1 to decide whether to retry Hernandez, who remains in custody.
The district attorney’s office said in a letter to a New York state court judge on Nov. 25 that it is “prepared to litigate the case.” Hernandez’s new trial must begin by June 1, 2026, or he will be released from custody.
“We remain confident that Mr. Hernandez is innocent,” Hernandez’s attorneys Harvey Fishbein and Alice Fontia said in a statement, according to the Associated Press and NBC News. Fishbein and Fontier added that they are ready for a retrial and will mount an “even stronger defense,” news outlets reported.
Etan’s disappearance shocked the nation and sparked a missing children movement, including National Missing Children Day on May 25 and the creation of a national hotline for missing children. The boy was never found and was declared legally dead in 2001, but he was one of the first missing children to be featured on the side of a milk carton as part of an effort to raise awareness of the disappearance and garner leads.
According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Etan was “a boy who has become synonymous with the name and face” of the national missing child problem. This case, along with the 1981 murder of 6-year-old Adam Walsh, changed the law enforcement response to missing children and led to the creation of a coordinated national system.
What happened to Etan Patz?
According to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Programs, Etan disappeared on the morning of May 25, 1979, while walking to school from his home in New York City’s Soho neighborhood. It was the first time I walked alone to catch the school bus, which was about two blocks from my house.
But he “didn’t follow through,” according to the Office of Justice Programs, and his parents reported him missing to police after he didn’t come home from school that night. “More than 100 police officers and bloodhounds launched an intensive search for the missing boy after his mother alerted the police,” authorities said in a statement.
The New York Times reported in 1979 that it was the largest and longest search for missing children in the city in decades.
Cases unsolved for decades
Etan’s disappearance remained unsolved for decades until 2012, when Hernandez, a former store clerk who worked near the bus stop and was 18 when the boy disappeared, was named a suspect. At the time, there was renewed interest in the cold case, and relatives told police that Hernandez had told a prayer group decades earlier that he had killed a child.
“This finally provided some answers for a family who had endured years of distress and anxiety, including repeated visits by strangers pretending to be their son,” the Office of Justice Programs said.
Hernandez later confessed to the crime, but his defense team argued at trial that it was a lie and the result of mental illness, USA TODAY previously reported. In his confession, Hernandez said he lured Etan to the store’s basement by offering him a soda, then strangled him, put him, still alive, in a box and left him in a pile of trash on the side of the road.
After the first murder trial ended in a hanging, Hernandez was found guilty of kidnapping and murder in a second trial in 2017 and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
Contributions: Jeanine Santucci, Greg Toppo, John Bacon, Kathryn Palmer, USA TODAY. Reuters
