NEW YORK – It was one of New York City’s most enduring mysteries: A sandy-haired, 6-year-old boy who vanished on his way to school. A fruitless search that scared a generation of parents. A family that fought for years to hold one man accountable, only to be told someone else was to blame.
Some questions remain in the 1979 disappearance of Etan Patz, but a jury decided Tuesday that it had enough evidence to convict a former convenience store clerk of luring the boy into a basement and killing him, after a first trial ended with a hung jury.
Pedro Hernandez confessed several years ago to choking Etan, but his lawyers said that admission was the false imagining of a troubled man whose mind blurred the boundary between reality and illusion.
During Hernandez’s first trial in 2015, that argument won over a lone juror, who wouldn’t budge and forced a mistrial. This second time around, the jury was unanimous, finding Hernandez guilty of murder and kidnapping after nine days of deliberations.
“We decided he has an illness … but that didn’t make him delusional,” said juror Michael Castellon. “We think that he could tell right from wrong. He could tell fantasy from reality.”